Refining Plant 3D's piping to resemble a realistic pipe model in Navisworks

My Last article touched on how to get Plant 3D and Navisworks to talk to each other better, so I thought the next logical step would be to touch on some settings I like to change to make the model look a little better.

Out of the box, Navisworks shows pipes as decagon tubes (10 sided) and this can be distracting when you are showing someone the plant and they keep asking why the pipes are not round and if this is a new cost saving pipe we are using in the design.

This can easily be rectified by changing the "Faceting Factor" which is set to “1” by default and setting this to “2” will double the number of facets (flat faces) that make up the pipe. So, if I set it to “10” I get a smooth pipe, and on decent CAD workstations, you will not notice any performance degradation.

To fix this do the following

1.?????Open Navisworks Manage/Simulate

2.?????Press F12 to bring up the Options dialog box

3.?????Go to “File Readers” -> “DWG/DXF” and set the "Faceting Factor" to 10

4.?????While you are here you could toggle the “Render Type” to shaded if you want Navisworks to ignore the Visual style that was used in AutoCAD but this is optional and it allows you to work in wireframe in Plant 3D but have the model be shaded in Navisworks

Like my previous post noted you will have to delete old related NWC files and recreate them by opening the NWF again so that it can recreate the new NWC with the above-mentioned settings being used.?