Create the best viewpoints
How to create the best viewpoints
We mean ‘best' in the sense of understandable for others as well as workable in the BIMcollab ecosystem and BCF-communication.
Before getting to the heart of the matter on how to create effective viewpoints, we would like to give you some basics so that you can better understand communication through BCF. The most important information in a viewpoint is:
- Snapshot image
- Camera position and projection
- Section planes (if any)
- List of IFC GUIDs of visible/selected/colored components
You will experience a dramatic slow-down of performance when synchronizing to BIMcollab Nexus when the list of IFC GUIDs becomes huge while working with big projects. Imagine a model of an office tower with more than 200.000 components. If they were all saved to a viewpoint this one viewpoint would contain more than 30Mb of data. Imagine having 30 of those viewpoints: they add up to 1Gb of data! This is why it is important to create viewpoints effectively.
Create light-weighted 3D views
By default, the BCF Manager and BIMcollab Zoom use the properties of the active view to store information in the viewpoint. To reduce the amount of data stored in a viewpoint, you can start by editing the display of your model in the current 3D view. You can choose to only show the part of the model which is necessary for understanding the issue you want to report. You can hide elements by zones, floors... Only keep the important components in the active view to limit the size of the viewpoint.
Additionally the BCF Manager will warn you if you are about to link more than 10.000 components.
When creating slides in Solibri it can easily happen that you link a huge number of components to the viewpoint. If you notice a big slow-down in the communication between BIMcollab and Solibri, this is probably the cause.
Store only what’s needed
After editing the 3D view of your model, there might still be a lot of visible components. All components that are visible at the moment of creating the issue will still be visible in the snapshot and when zooming to the issue, but only the chosen components will be linked to the viewpoints and show up in the list of IFC GUIDs. When creating a new issue the BCF manager allows you to choose which items will be stored in the viewpoint:
- Visible components
- Selected components
- None = Show whole model
Use section planes
When there are no components linked to a viewpoint it means that the whole model will be visible. Use this to your advantage by showing the whole model but cut parts away by section planes. Section planes only contain coordinates and thus don't take up a lot of data.
It’s all about communication
Take in mind that the snapshot is also part of the communication and that a zoom-to does not have to show exactly what is on the snapshot. Think about it this way: create a 3D view with many components visible where only a few problematic components are highlighted. It could be enough to just link the highlighted (selected) components to the viewpoint: the modeler will understand from the snapshot and your comment what is expected from him, and he can use the zoom-to to lookup the problematic components.
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