From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

Understanding the Style Palette - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

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Understanding the Style Palette

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- [Voiceover] Styles are what makes everything in your InfraWorks 360 model look the way it does. So, if you master styles, you can master the appearance of your model. Let's get started in our discussion of styles by looking at the style palette. I'm in the chapter five Lynda Heights model, and I've chosen a proposal called "styles", and I've restored the "common area ISO" bookmark. But, let's start by showing you just how you even get to the styles palette. There are two ways you can do it: In the "core tools" toolbar, you can click the "manage" icon, and there you'll see the "style palette" option. Or, if you're in the "create" menu, you'll also see the "style palette" option. There are actually more ways even than that to get to it, so that tells you it must be a pretty important function. When I launch the tool, the style palette window opens on the right side of the screen. By default, it's docked, but you can un-dock it and re-size it, or even move it to another monitor, if you choose. For our purposes, here, I'm gonna' keep it docked on the right side of the screen. In the style palette, you'll notice a series of tabs down the left side. Each tab represents styles for a type of object. Barrier, coverage, facade for buildings, 3D models and so on. For some style types or some tabs, you'll see the styles that are contained within broken into these folders, which are referred to as "catalogs". And for others, you may find that they are not broken into catalogs. For example, pipelines. There just aren't enough of them to warrant organizing them into sub-categories. And, of course, the style palette is customizeable. You can add catalogs, you can add styles, you can copy styles and make changes to them. We'll actually get to that in just a moment. So, as I said, we've got a series of tabs down the left side. Across the top, we have got some buttons that are used to manage catalogs. You can add new catalogs, remove them, and you can even import and export catalogs. Which is a really important thing to know about, because catalogs are stored within the model. Now, the software comes with some default catalogs built in, but if, throughout your time working with InfraWorks 360, you've developed some of your own styles and your own catalogs, you're more than likely going to want those to be available in all of the models that you work in. And the way that you make that possible is to create your own catalog and then export it out as a file, which is a JSON file. J S O N. And, you can store that on your hard drive or on the server if you're in a team environment, store it in a place on the server where anyone can get to it. And then, for every model that you create, you can import that JSON file, and that will add the catalog to your style palette. So, it's a really important thing to know about, because you're going to create styles that don't come with the software that you're gonna wanna use on every model. You can also copy and rename catalogs. But it's important for me to point out that the root catalogs can't be renamed. So, for example, if I'm in the 3D model catalog, and I select "bridge", actually I can't see the full name of that, so I'll show you another feature. If I click this drop down here, I can change the display to "icon list". Small icons, medium icons, large icons. I tend to prefer icon list, because it lets me read the entire title of either the style or the catalog. But, if I select "bridge components", you'll notice that I can't rename that. It's a read-only style catalog, and what it really means is that it came with the software; it's baked in and it's not something that I can change. And probably all of these are like that. But, if I make a new catalog, notice that I have the "rename" option for that catalog. Now, I can also remove that catalog since it's a custom one, but I can't remove the read-only catalogs, the baked-in catalogs from the software. So, that's a good thing. It keeps me from deleting the stock catalogs that I might use as examples to copy and create new styles. It's also just good to have that content available so that I can apply it to various things in my model. So that's what the buttons across the top do. They are used for managing the catalogs. Across the bottom, we use those buttons to manage individual styles. Either on a tab or within a catalog. So let's go to a different tab to show you what you can do when you create new styles. I'll go to "material", and let's open "terrain". And, notice that if I select the styles are here already, that came with the software, I can copy them to different catalogs, copy them within this catalog, or edit them, but I can't rename them. These are read-only styles; they came with the software. If I add a new one, I'll just accept the defaults all around and this one is called "new material", notice that I can rename it as well. And I can also delete it, if I select this style, here, the delete option is grayed-out, but I can delete a style that I created myself. So there's a level of protection there that keeps you from removing the styles that came with the software. And one last feature of the style palette, which is probably my absolute favorite feature, is the ability to drag and drop. So, I'll show you an example with a building style. Notice that we've got some residential buildings shown in our development, here. So I'm going to go into the "3D model" tab, I'll back up using the parent folder, and there's some residential building styles. And all I have to do to change the style of an object is drag and drop the style from the style palette onto the object. So, if I want to change whatever this style happens to be, to "single-story brick", I just drag and drop the style right onto the building, and, just like that, it magically changes it to a different style. And that's true of buildings, light-posts, roads, coverages, you name it. All you have to do is drag and drop the style onto the object in the model and it will change. So that's a very efficient, visual, and direct way of assigning style to an object. Of course, there are other ways. I can use the stack to change the style. I can use the "properties" window. But I think the most efficient way is to drag and drop from the style palette. So, now that you've seen the style palette, you understand a bit about how InfraWorks 360 thinks about styles. And you're now ready to begin creating and modifying styles of your own, and really getting control of your InfraWorks 360 world.

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