Understanding Selection Resolution in Navisworks: A Comprehensive Guide

Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering Selection Resolution and we'll be using the Meadowgate.nwd model. We'll be working with the Office 2 Viewpoint.

Make sure that your Viewpoints panel is open and select Office 2 and we will be working with these cubicles. So Selection Resolution works like this. We have a number of objects in our Meadowgate.nwd file and we can see that by expanding it and say for example we expand the Furniture Second Floor we'll have a number of other layers underneath those and we can continue to go until we reach all the way to the bottom which is simple geometry.

If we were to select something on screen by just pointing and clicking, how does Navisworks know what to select? I'm selecting a desktop but that's within a number of other layers. This is where Selection Resolution comes in. If you go to your Home tab and go over to the Select and Search panel you'll see that you can drop that panel down and underneath the fly-out or in the fly-out you'll see that you have another drop-down that says Selection Resolution.

Yours could be set to anything—mine is set to Geometry currently. So Selection Resolution goes from the largest object to the smallest possible selection object. Mine is set to Geometry which means that if I were to select anything on screen then it's always going to go to the last piece of that hierarchy.

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If I were to change this to say Layer, which is a lot less fine than Geometry, and I select say this desk, then it will select all of the other workspaces that are within that one Layer and select the entire Layer at once. The other options include these things called objects. I have First Object and Last Object.

So First Object—if you have that set and you select anything in that Layer—then we'll see that underneath the A Desk G, A Desk A being the first object, everything beneath that is going to be selected. And if we select Last Object, then we'll see that underneath A Desk A, this last object—Chair Swivel—not the geometry but the object itself—is going to be the thing that's selected. What becomes an object and what becomes geometry in Navisworks all depends on the program you're exporting from.

With Revit you could have families inside of families, and that family or group that is within the other family would be either your Last Object or some kind of middle object or even perhaps the First Object. But because of the nature of the files that we'll be working on I recommend leaving the Selection Resolution at either Last Object or Geometry.

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If you prefer, instead of using this fly-out in the Home tab Select and Search panel, you can also right-click on the object that you want to select and then change your Selection Resolution on the fly. Keep in mind that this does not limit you to only selecting layers if you have your Selection Resolution set to Layer. If I were to select the A Desk G, I can still select any object beneath that Layer—it's just that on the screen, if I were to select anything with my Select tool, then it's going to always select the Layer if that is set to Selection Resolution: Layer.

So get familiar with how the Selection Resolution is working by setting it to different settings and perhaps selecting different things on screen and seeing where they lie within your Selection Tree. And then once you're done, make sure that you set it either to Geometry or Last Object as a starting point for our next videos. Simple concept but an important one, and that concludes this video.

Thank you.

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