In this session, I will show you how to use the Section Box tool. The Section Box tool is a productive tool. It allows us to create a cross-sectional view of a BIM model, so we can easily check the inside structures or decorations of the model. First, let us click the “ 3D House icon’’ in the “Quick access toolbar” to open the 3D view of the model. Then, let us scroll down the “Property Palette” and tick the “Section Box”. While moving the mouse over the section box, we can see the edges of the box get highlighted. Let us click on one of the edges, we can then see many double-headed arrows. These arrows are used for controlling sections. To demonstrate how it works, let us click this arrow of the rectangular box and drag it to some elevation to create a cross-sectional view of the model. You can drag another arrow to create a cross section in a different direction. Also, we can use the “View Cube” at the upper right corner to quickly change the view into a predefined one. For example, if we click on the surface with a word “Top” on it, we have the top view of the model. Now, let us say we want to have a cross-sectional view of the model from the side, how do we do it? First, we click on the “small house” at the upper left corner of the View Cube to return to the default 3D view. Next, click on the arrow on the face of the rectangular box on the right side of the model and drag to the position we want. Then, we can see the interior design or structure from the right side of the model. In this session, I will show you how to create vertical and horizontal section views. We often use different views, such as plan views, elevation views and 3D views to inspect our models. Each of these common views provides different capability and advantages for us to check the model. But they still have their own limitations when we need to check some details in the model. Section views give us more flexibility to check the model’s details that may not be visible or shown well using other views. Let me use the interior stair in the B1 as an example to demonstrate how section views work. First, let us expand the structural plan views in the project browser. Then, we open the view called B1. As you can see, it is impossible to inspect quickly if the stair was built correctly from this view or a 3D view. In this kind of conditions, the section views are very helpful. To generate a section view, click on the “View” tab and select “Section” icon on the “Create” panel. Then, we click where we want to place our section view. This defines the start point of this view. We then move to the position where we want to place our end point of the view and click again to finish creating the section view. It is easy to control the generated section view. For example, we can change the width and depth of the view; we can also move the end point and start point by dragging them. There are other control icons that we can use, such as the “flip control”, indicated by two arrows pointing opposite directions. This control icon is used to flip the direction of our view. The ”cycle section head“ or “cycle section tail” icon, which looks like a circular arrow, can help us to change between three options like Tail, head and nothing for the section mark. Under the category of section views, we can find all section views we have created in the project browser. Also, we can simply double click on the section head to open the section view. As you can see, when we open the section view, the default range will include the entire building. If this is not desired, we can just drag the blue control points to reduce this range. For this case, our goal is to inspect the B1 stair, so we reduce it to the B1 level. Now we can appropriately inspect the B1 stair.
