Sectioning tool - SOLIBRI Tutorial

- [Instructor] Last but not least in this getting started chapter with Solibri Office, we're going to look at the section tool. Now again, we go up to the component menu and click on the flyer here, and we're going to select sectioning. You'll notice you can also press zero on the keyboard to enter the sectioning part of Solibri Office. Now, we've got our 3D model. We're still in our Solibri building IFC model. It's the same as it has been all the way throughout this particular chapter. Now, let's have a look at how this sectioning tool works. You'll notice I just move my pointer. I'm going to click on the roof, and that roof now becomes my section plane. And you can see there that if I hold down shift and left hand click and drag, I can move that section plane up and down to my heart's content. So I'm going to bring it about halfway down through the floor like that. Now, the navigational tools are still there. I can left click and drag to pivot 'round. And what I'm going to do here is just pivot that 'round, and now I'm going to select this wall here as my next section plane. Now, how many section planes can you have? Well you can have up to six, one in each direction stroke axis. So again, Shift + left click and drag, and I can drag that section plane in like so, and that'll highlight things like the staircase. And you can see that I've got things like the lift shaft, the rooms, and so on. So I'm going to do that so that we can just see part of the staircase like that. The benefit you have here is I can now have up to six planes. My navigation tools still work, so I pivot that 'round, zoom out slightly, and I'll pivot that up a little bit. And you can see that the current section plane is the one highlighted in blue. So if I do a shift and a left click and a drag, you can see there that the current plane is the top one and I move up and down. If I come to here, that plane there, click and drag. And you can see I've got to be in the view, so to speak. So if I come in here and do that and then do a left click, can you see? I can kind of move it that way. You got to be in the right direction of plane to move the section plane. So don't be confused by that, it can be a little bit bewildering when you're first using Solibri Office. So I'm just going to pivot that 'round again, and just zoom and just pivot up a little bit more. And you'll notice there that I can pan as well. Pan works too. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to select another plane, which is going to be that front wall there like so. And again, it's just a left click and a shift, bring that in, and can you see I'm cutting into the building again, and I can now do another little pivot outside. And you can see like I've got three planes there now, and I can do this to my heart's content in the model at any time. Now, what we can do is, well is just reposition the view. And we'll just zoom in a bit, so it's nice and clean and easy to see, there we go like so. Now, the active section is blue. And as you can see I can click on any of these like so, there's one there, there's one there. That one, to click on it, could be a little bit more complex, but the trick is I pivot 'round and I select it there like that. So I'm just going to pivot that back 'round again, and now can you see it's the current section plane. Now, what I can do here, is select the top one. That was the one that I used the roof for. And now if I just hit backspace, can you see, it flips the section plane, so I'm only seeing what is above the section plane, which does look a bit odd. But if I hit backspace again, just flips it, it's like a toggle flipping it from one side to the other. If I select the front section plane there and do the same, backspace, can you see? I've now got the windows and all the glazing in place. Hit backspace again. Goes back to where I originally set it to. If I click away, you can see that I can only have one section plane valid if I click away from the model from any given time, like so. Now, the benefit I've got as well is I can delete any active section. So if it's highlighted in blue, and I hit the delete key, it's gone. Can you see that? So now that active section has gone, and all I've got now is two sections. I've got the front wall one, and if I just pivot 'round, I've got the side wall one like that. So I've got only two section planes now, and it's very quick and easy to bring back those planes, so I can just use undo like so. So if I undo a few times and bring that back, as you can see, my plane is now back again, the roof section plane that I set up originally. So make sure that you use that undo and redo up there on the toolbar, very, very useful. Now, last but not least, which is really quite cool, is the ability to rotate your section planes. So what I'm going to do now, I'm just going to pivot 'round a bit, zoom out slightly 'cause this is kind of fun and it can make your building look very, very strange too so be aware of that. What I'm going to do is select a plane, and if I use, just hold down the X key, can you see I can rotate that x-axis. I can rotate that on the y-axis like that, and I can start making these sections look a little bit weird and wonderful. I can also do an Alt + X. Can you see that, goes in the opposite direction. And an Alt + Y going in the other direction, the opposing directions, it's kind of clockwise and counterclockwise. Now, one of the benefits you have with this is you can use undo to make any changes that you want on the toolbar, but more importantly, you can just hit delete to remove any of these section planes. So if I remove each one, selecting them one by one, I'm now back to my original building model. It's that quick, and it's that easy. If I pan that down and zoom in, we're now back to the original building with no section planes in place. But the benefit you have there is you can go into any model. Now bear in mind, this model was created using an IFC file, an Industry Foundation Class file that was exported from an original authoring product, in this case, ArchiCAD, but it could've been Revit, it could've been any other 3D architectural modeling tool. But the benefit you have is in Solibri Office, you can view that model. You can go and check all of the components in that model, and the sectioning allows you to drill into the model and see what's inside the model visually, as well as using the model tree and the info views in your model layer.