From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: User

Opening a Plant 3D model

From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: User

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Opening a Plant 3D model

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- [Instructor] When you open any model files, it's imperative that you open the file within the project manager window, and not using Windows Explorer. The reason for this is that Plant 3D Models don't just contain graphics, but they also contain database information. When you open a file, two things happen. The graphics are brought up in the AutoCAD space, and the drawing database is linked with the overall project database. So, let's take a look in our project manager, under Chapter One. We have two ways of opening up a drawing file. As you see here under the Plant 3D drawing, there's a note that expands if there's drawings in here, we'll just click on the plus sign. We'll see all the drawings that are contained in this project. And, to open them, we can click on one of the files, and double click to open, and if you look at the tab, right on the top here, you'll see 01_01_Piping has opened. Or, the option we have, is we can jus select the drawing, and right click, and we can just choose open. So, you'll see that this looks like just regular AutoCAD, the graphics open up in the CAD window, as expected, but if you look down at the bottom here, you'll see some additional information regarding that file. Expand this out a little bit, and you'll see, even though, we can't see the path, we only see the file name, if we look under this panel here, under details, you can see that we have the full path that tells you exactly where this file's located. Now, we can see that it's locked by myself. Found some additional information when it was last saved. Metadata, I guess, associated with this file. We can change the data we see here by clicking here for details. If we click on the little magnifying glass, we can get a preview, so we can go down, and look at all the drawings and see if it contains any graphic information. We can get an idea of what that is without having to open the drawing up. And, we also have a work history. So, we can take a look at this particular piping model, and look and see when it was last modified. Who used it last. And, even though we can assign a status here, just bear in mind we don't have to lock this. This is just basically a notation that we have in the database. So, if this is in progress, I can mark this in progress. If this model is complete, and we're ready for issue, we can mark it for review, or anyone of the combinations here. And again, this can be modified. We can customize this to include any other information that we want. This is done at the project admin level. So, just to recap, I want to make sure that you understand that you always, always, always, open your files from this location, and never from Windows Explorer. And, this'll ensure that both the graphics, and the data changes that you make, are written back to the project database.

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