Inspect Panel

Open this panel by clicking the Inspect icon at the top right corner of your screen.

Default selection mode

For more information about the default selection mode, please read this article.

Overview of the Inspect Panel

If your selection consists of multiple IFC classes or if your selection contains nested parts, a total count of selected products will be shown, of which you can show a more detailed overview. In this example, 1 roof is selected as well as 1 railing consisting of members and plates.

Below this overview, all shared properties of the selected products are displayed.

Shared properties are properties that apply to all products in the current selection. Typical examples of shared properties will be Name (every product has a name), Model (every product exists within a model), Class (every product has an IFC class), ... In the image below, there also happens to be a property Phase in the property set Phasing that is assigned to both the railing and the roof.

Properties that do not apply to all products in the selection will not be displayed here. For example, the property set Pset_RailingCommon as defined by the IFC schema only applies to Railings, not Roofs. Therefore, it will not be shown under the shared properties.

To display all properties of the selected objects of a specific IFC class, click that class at the top of the Inspect panel. Property sets can be expanded and collapsed, and you can use the Filter text field to filter on properties or property values.

When selecting a single part, its name will be displayed as well as a little information icon, which allows you to copy that object's GUID - a globally unique identifier - to your clipboard.

When selecting multiple parts, the number of parts having a specific property value will be displayed next to that property value. In the image below, 10 windows are selected. They are all part of the same site and the same building. 5 of these windows are located on the 3rd floor and the other 5 are located on the 4th floor. There are three different types of windows in the selection set. Clicking the number next to a property value will reduce the selection to only those parts that have that property value.

If you have editing rights to the model, you can click the property value and change the value, or click the ellipsis icon next to a property to either clear their value, edit their value or remove the property altogether.

Use the filter at the top of the Inspect panel to easily find one or more specific attributes or properties you are interested in.

The properties in the inspect panel are divided into three main categories:

• General information about the selection, such as spatial location (site - building - floor - space), material, type, model, IFC class and code.

• Attributes: built-in fields defined directly in the IFC schema that do not reside in Property Sets.

• Other properties of the selection. These can be either IFC-defined property sets or custom property sets defined in a custom property library.

Adding new attributes and properties

You can add general information, attributes and properties to your selection by clicking the green + icon in the bottom right corner of the Inspect panel. Note that to add a code, material, location or type to your selection, it should first be defined in the project library.

Choosing to add a Property will open the libraries from which you can add property definitions. By default the following libraries are available:

• IFC properties library, as defined by buildingSMART. Only those property sets that are applicable to the products you have selected will be displayed.

• Custom imported properties, containing properties and property sets defined in the models that were imported in this project.

• Custom property libraries, which can be defined in the project dashboard.

Click a property set to add it to the selected products, or click the chevron next to the property set name to expand the property set, allowing you to select individual properties. If a property definition already has a grey checkmark next to its name, that means this property is already applied to the selected products.

Once you have selected the property definitions you want to add to your selection, click the Add button on the bottom right. You can now optionally fill in some values for these selected properties and save these values, or skip this step and fill in the property values later.

Relations with library items

As already mentioned in a previous paragraph, to add a code, material, location or type to your selection, it should first be defined in the project library. This is because the actual definition of these items is managed in libraries on project level; in the Inspect Panel you can only add, remove or change a relation between a model object and a library item such as material, code, location or type. If you want to e.g. change the material of model object, you can change the relation of this model object to the material library (i.e. point to another existing material in the library) or you can modify the actual material definition in the Libraries Panel (which will affect all other model objects across your project that have that specific material).

To go to the definition of the library item from within the Inspect Panel, hover over the library item and a button should appear that will open the Libraries Panel and take you to the definition of the highlighted library item.

Moving products to other models

The Inspect Panel can also be used to move products from one model to another. This means you can effectively merge models together, or split models up into smaller pieces.

Simply select the product(s) you want to move, and under the General tab click the Model property. This will open the list of all models in the projects you have modeling access to. If this list only contains the one model, you can upload model models to the project in the Dashboard or add a new empty model in the Browse panel.

Deep Selection Mode

For more information about the deep selection mode, please read this article.

The inspect panel can also be used during Deep Selection mode, and will display information about the currently selected faces, edges and/or bodies. In the image below, one body is selected consisting of 4 faces and 6 edges. The total volume of the selected body is 0.002 m³.

If you want more information about the specific faces or edges, you can click the 'Face' or 'Edge' node in the structure tree at the top. In the image below, we find that there is a total of 4 Spline edges and 2 Linear edges, with a total length of 4295.129 mm.