Visualizing Civil Projects using the Autodesk AEC Collection

welcome my name is Jeff bartels I am an infrastructure technical specialist here at Autodesk our presentation today is called project visualization and public outreach now specifically what we're going to be talking about is taking a civil 3d design something that we've been working on and modeling and we are going to look at how we can move that over into infraworks and create some compelling visualizations that we could take to a public meeting to try and gain support for our project along the way we are going to be looking at using some of the other tools in the AC collection we'll talk about those as we go a little bit about myself I have been working in the civil infrastructure industry for more than 20 years for a good portion of that time I was the CAD manager at a civil engineering and consulting firm while I was there I was responsible for the creation of large-scale plan sets and construction documents I did in-house training and implementation of software I was also responsible for creating and maintaining CAD standards I have been teaching Autodesk applications for more than 15 years towards the end of that timeframe I worked for an Autodesk channel partner where we were we specialized in doing civil 3d implementations for the last four years I have been working for Autodesk I serve on the North East territory team where I do pre-sales demonstrations and support and on occasion training as part of Autodesk I contribute to a blog called civil immersion you can see the URL here on screen we post Autodesk infrastructure tips and tricks at least two or three a week we have been for the last year and a half so just an overview of today's presentation we are going to be visualizing a detailed design we're gonna be moving that from civil 3d into infraworks along the way we will be looking at how we can add landscaping and furniture furnitures kind of a fancy word for people cars street signs things like that I'm also going to show you how you can model custom content in the event some of the items you know specific items you are looking for aren't available in the infraworks library once we get our model in a nice visual state we're going to look at how we can create exhibits that we can take to a meeting these would include still images animations kind of like a fly through animation we'll put together today we're also going to talk about how we can create low-cost VR many times when you hear the concept of virtual reality you think well that's got to be expensive or it's gonna be difficult or it's got a you know involve getting additional hardware we're gonna look at how we can take our infraworks model and view it in 3d using a smart phone without any extra you know software anything on the phone we'll wrap up with a summary and then I will be addressing questions about the session after the session is over my goals for today everything will be a win if what I want to do is give you exposure to the Autodesk AEC collection we're going to be looking at several of the applications in the collection from an infrastructure perspective the applications that we look at we're going to be talking you know looking at just a subset and what these things can do each of the application that we look at you know each each application that we cover today could easily be a presentation all by itself so just gonna be looking at some of the high points just showing you some workflows that are possible along the way we will be I'm hoping that I can convey some of the business benefits of using these tools and then the final goal is to make sure that all of your questions are addressed this will be a PowerPoint free zone I'm not a huge fan of PowerPoint I would rather work in the software I have found that's more impactful rather than showing screenshots and telling you what the software does I'd rather actually get in there and show you so that's that's what we're gonna be doing today for that reason I've got the what to expect slide I just want to mention that there is a significant amount of internet traffic being generated by today's virtual event and we are all sharing the same bandwidth so for that reason you may see some pixelization when objects are being moved around on screen I apologize for that I'm gonna try and keep that in mind and try and stay still as much as possible but I want to explain to you why you may be seeing that if in fact you are and it's just it's a byproduct of trying to push the envelope as to as to what we can get away with in this virtual environment so with that we're gonna go ahead and get started with the live demonstration let me take this down and I am gonna start out here in civil 3d let's maximize this on my screen I've got a civil 3d model and this represents a proposed roadway and park design you can see that my roadway model has been created as a corridor let me zoom in here I've also got a park site that I'm working on this is actually a project that some of my colleagues and I have been passing back and forth each of us adds a piece to it so somebody else did the corridor here it was my job to go through and model this parking lot area I have created this parking lot using feature lines so it's already established in 3d I've then gone through and created a top surface for this let's take a look at that I'll go to the prospector tab here and then I'm gonna right-click on my surface and I will choose surface properties and we'll just choose the triangles only surface style here I will then select the surface and we'll take a look at it let me go to object viewer and I'll maximize this on screen and I'm paying mind to the possibility of pixelization there I just want to show you that you know with that surface we can see the relief of the curb and gutter and the these small islands there we can also kind of see the grading through here that's going to allow the drainage for this parking lot so that design is finished let me close this and I'm going to hide the surface again let's just do that it's still selected I'm gonna go to the properties palette here and I'll set this to no display let me back up also notice that I'm viewing this design on top of the Bing imagery that comes along with civil 3d you know I'm not really not I'm leveraging this for visualization purposes only so you can see how this project fits in the context of the real world so what I'm going to do as I want to start let's say I'm to a point where I want to start moving this design into infraworks to create visualizations to take to a meeting so I'm at this point I've showed you the surface that I've created for this parking lot I have already created a surface for these corridors I've created some additional grading surfaces in here and I have saved those as I've kind of pasted them all together into this one big surface called composite top this represents my my overall top surface for the entire project and I'm gonna start in moving data over into infraworks I'm going to start by moving that surface over and the way I would move that surface if I go to output here I can choose export tool and XML and then you can see all the things that we can export I'm gonna clear the list here and here's where I can export that that composite top surface I would just select it here and then I could come down and click OK to export that veal and XML now I've already done that let me close this I would like to jump over to infraworks here I have the basically the starting point of my model this is maybe we'll say this was created from model builder and I have my my USGS topography will say that maybe I've got some survey grade existing topography through here all right so the service has been augmented in that respect I have aerial photo I've deleted the like the GIS roads I really don't need those because I'm going to be swapping those out with my proposed roadway so those would kind of be getting in the way so I've kind of removed those for now let me pan the silver I would like to import that surface so I'm going to bring up Windows Explorer I'll jump into my content folder here and in my land xml's folder I'll take that XML surface that I saved out and I'll just drag and drop this into the infraworks environment that's one of the nice things about our applications if a particular file format can live inside the application you don't have to know the import tool you can just physically drag and drop it into the application and we'll see that several times today using that drag-and-drop functionality now when it comes in I just have to tell infraworks what it is now Noah since its land XML it's gonna be a terrain and it's gonna choose clothes and refresh here and it will take him and regenerate my model it will also take that land XML data and it will swap out the the surface in the model you know and they have when they overlap the the area of the proposed surface then will be the the one that's current on top so we'll let this process it's cleaning up here and as soon as we can see that on screen I'm going to zoom in and we'll take a look I'm gonna be gonna be mindful of the of the screen movements here let me just double click here real quick and then I'll back up a touch this way you can see the relief of the curb and gutter now so the the per the proposed surface let me pan this over a little bit let me stop there and what kind of let that catch up here I'm hoping you can see the relief of that parking lot as well we can kind of see the islands here too so I've moved the proposed or I've swapped out from an elevational standpoint I've I've swapped out the elevational data in this infraworks model so now it's reflecting my proposed design let me back up and I'll kind of Center this on screen and we'll jump back over to civil 3d so the next thing I'd like to do is export my geometry alright we'll do that I'm going to hide my background image I don't need to see that so we'll go to the geolocation tab and I'll just turn the map off and I'm going to freeze my corridor let me choose freeze here and I will select that perfect so even those corridor is a 3d model it's made up of these featured lines that are that are 3d line strings my parking lot is made up from these 3d line strings let's zoom in if I hover over these I can see this one represents the edge of my walk I've got some here that represent the the curb and gutter and my edge of pavement so all of these feature lines were extracted from that corridor model and then you know my parking lot these feature lines were were created automatically didn't have to be mm-hmm or where they were created as part of the design so they didn't have to be extracted so basically I've just got a bunch of feature lines here I'm gonna open another drawing let me jump over here so what I did I took those linear items and I just you know had to close up the ends if I hover over this one for a second we can see that one represents my concrete I closed up the ends there and I've got that as a polyline I've also got a polyline that represents my edge of pavement or my asphalt so I went through it took me maybe ten minutes to to convert these things into nice closed shapes that I can then leverage or used to stylize by infraworks model so what we'll do I'll show you how I get these out I've got a concrete shape here we would use a command called map export we're going to be leveraging some of the map 3d functionality in civil 3d map export allows me to export my geometry to a shape file you can see that it happens to be the default here maybe I would like to call this concrete I'll click OK and let me drag this over I would like to export a polygon I'm going to select that manually I'll grab this concrete one and I'll press enter now when I export this if I wanted to if there was any data associated with this I could I can include that data as well the the data the attribution that's not going to be necessary in this case I just want it for visualization purposes we'll go to the options tab and I'm going to do one more thing I'll say treat closed polylines as polygons in a shape file a closed areas considered a polygon so that'll take care of everything for me I would then come down and click OK to save that shape file now I've already done that so in this case I'm going to close out of the dialog box here and I'll hit cancel I have also gone through an export at some of the other shape other closed areas as shape files so once we do that jump back over to infraworks so where we left off our terrain was taken care of let's bring in some of the geometry I'm going to go back to Windows Explorer here and I will jump up a directory let's go into shapes I'll go into this folder called session I'm going to grab this shape file called concrete overall and I'll just drag and drop that into the in for works environment when it comes in I need to tell infraworks what this is it's a coverage area and then coming over here under style I can click the pencil and say what I want this to look like I want it to look like concrete let me click OK and then I'll choose close and refresh and what it'll do is bring that geometry in and it's essentially going to stylize my proposed surface in that area to look like concrete so when this refreshes we will see the difference on screen there we go I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and we'll orbit this now when you think of exporting concrete you may be wondering you know man you could have I mean why didn't you export all of these sidewalks as little slivers in the little curb and gutter I mean wouldn't you have to export those as slivers no I you see I exported a bounding shape and then I can bring in the pavement now and set that right on top we have the ability of doing like like a draw order this prevents us from having to create a whole ton of shapes to replicate our design let me go back to my Windows Explorer here and we'll take the asphalt overall shape let me drag that in and drop it once I drop it I will select that this is going to be a coverage area and then I'll click the pencil and I want this one to look like asphalt there are a ton of materials in here so asphalt's the one I need right now I will select that and then once this closes and refreshes we will see that asphalt material is now sitting on top of the the concrete there perfect so you can see very simple now it's I can you know I can start to see now the the definition of the curb and gutter I would simply bring in additional shapes now for things like striping and stuff like that I'm gonna bring in one more I'm gonna bring in the material that repertory shape that represents the grass areas in civil3d the edge of my proposed surfaces I can extract that boundary that's that's easy enough that shows me the limits of my grading I could also take viewing the Bing imagery in civil 3d I could trace any areas that are going to be significantly changed you know for instance this area here maybe with the with the trees and the sidewalk maybe I'd like to redo this so I could export that as a grass area just to kind of clean up the imagery over here and infer works and give us a clean slate in fact if I back up we're gonna have a large park site over here and you can see that you know some of the stuff is going to be removed so I'd like to cover that with with grass for right now so that it looks new once again let me go back to Windows Explorer here now I've already done that over in civil3d I trace to the grass areas and created this shape file let me drag this in same workflow it's gonna be coverage area and I want it to look like grass I'll click OK and then I'll close and refresh this will process and when this comes up you can see that I don't have to be you know 100% perfect as I do my tracing that's because because of that draw order I can I can you know rely on overlap of objects as I pan this over you can see that this is now a clean grass area although you can see the grass is kind of sitting on top of some of these shapes that are already here not a problem I can control the stacking order of the coverages let me open my infraworks menu here and I'll choose surface layers I can then choose that grass overall shape and I can use these arrows so I'll just push that down so it's beneath the concrete and then I'll click OK it will then go through and reprocess the stacking order and we'll see that these now look acceptable there we go that looks good so my workflow at this point would be to continue going through bringing in additional content and rather than watching me do that I am going to load a different proposal proposals in infraworks represent various stages or alternates of a design rather than creating multiple copies you can create proposals each proposal then is is its only saving the Delta that's saving the difference between that proposal and the and the original model that it was created from so if I flip to this new proposal you can see what it would look like if we spent a little bit more time bringing in additional shapes I've got shapes for the striping here in the parking lot and in the roundabout I've got additional sidewalks here stop Mars things like that all this content was created from civil3d and you may be wondering well you know if the design changes I mean how difficult would it be to make the the transition or you know make the updates well the the geometries in civil3d if I simply export that as new shape files I would just overwrite the shape files that are already there you can see that they're kind of highlighted here these shape files they're still it's still maintaining a link to those so I would just have to overwrite the original shape file with the new geometry and then I would come over here and select the one that I'm interested in and then I could come up and choose refresh to refresh that data source and bring in the latest version so now that I have come this far if I orbit this around we can see there's my my Park site there I've got a soccer field here I've got a playground that I've laid out there I'd like to start adding some embellishments to this model some accoutrements if you will I'm going to excuse me I'm gonna add some trees we'll do that by opening the infraworks menu and then I'm going to come down to the draw tool and you could see the number of things that we can draw here okay just a bunch of different types of objects I'm going to choose stand of trees and then when this comes up I will select a tree I'll go ahead and grab this one for right now and then I will double click to place that in the model and then let me see if I can close some of this stuff up here let me zoom in what kind of orbit that around and I'll press escape and we'll give it a chance to catch up if it has to so when I drop that tree in the model you can see it's just a matter of double-clicking and it's there this mod or this tree then has these grips on the side I can click and hold and I can adjust its rotation I can use this grip at the top to adjust its height I can then use this gizmo if I click the little red pad here I can move this tree around and place it exactly where I need it let me press escape to deselect that and I'm gonna pan this over so I placed one tree in the model I'd like to place some additional trees let me choose stand of trees again and I'll choose a different type of tree we'll grab the yellow one this time now instead of double-clicking to place one tree I am going to click to create it's a little hard to see on screen here but I'm creating a shape or an area I'll take and define that area and then I will double click when I'm finished and infraworks will place trees randomly within that closed boundary let me zoom out just a little and I'll press escape you can see that when it places the trees there I've got a slider this controls like the density of the trees and that Shea in that within that shape now maybe I'd like these to be quite heavy in here I could you know the farther I drag this to the right when I release you can see I get more trees inside that boundary I apologize there we go if I select that grouping of trees I can then use this grip to adjust their height as a group I can adjust their density back down if I want to I can also select the trees individually and I have this access to the same grips that we have if we insert a single tree so very easy to import content now I am going to take these trees out and we have to here I'll take those out what if you know I could go through and I could take and populate this thing with the different trees and different species and sizes and stuff that I need for my for my land plan or I could make things a little bit easier what if what if we had a landscape architect working on this project and they designed the tree layout you know species Heights the drip lines things like that and they were able to give us that data as a shape file I can leverage that shape file and the attribution on those trees to drop those right into this model and take care of everything in just a matter of a couple seconds let's try that I'm gonna orbit this around and then I'm gonna jump back into my content folder here let's go to shapes we'll go to session I've got a folder here called trees so let's let's assume we got this proposed trees shapefile from a landscape architect I'm just gonna drag this in and when it comes in I'm gonna tell him four works what this file represents these are trees and then I'm gonna go to source and I'll say that when this comes in I want to drape these trees on the surface finally I'm gonna go to the table tab since the shape file has attribution that that represents like the species and the height in the dripline I want to use that attribution to stylize these trees so I'm gonna come down to manual style let me open this up here we can see the attributes that are coming along with the shape file I would like the style driven by these species attribution this way an oak tree looks like an oak tree a maple tree looks like a maple let me go to the scale here scale Z I want that driven by the height that way the trees Heights will measure what was collected in the or what the landscape architect came up with and then scale Y and scale X I want these driven by the dripline attribution when I'm finished I'll come down and choose close and refresh and it'll place those trees at the appropriate location and with the appropriate species with the with the appropriate height and drip lines I can populate this model in just a matter of seconds now I did it with proposed data there's there's nothing to say that you can't do it with existing two if if your surveyor could take and provide a shape file that has the tree locations and the height and the drip line if that attribution was was collected or if it would be helpful in a visualization that that information can be collected and they wouldn't even have to collect all the species what if they did just a deciduous and coniferous and and very quickly you know flesh out an existing visualization and have accurate trees in there so I just wanted to show you that that was possible so now that I've got some trees in here let's add some other content I'm gonna orbit around and I'm gonna zoom in quick on the stop bar here and then we'll hesitate for a second and let that catch up if it has to I will then I want to insert a stop sign I've got a stop bar here so let's let's go ahead and insert a stop sign with that I'm gonna go back to the draw menu and I will choose city furniture now there are probably more than a thousand items in here you know 3d content that you can pull from this library and insert into your infraworks model it has a nice search box at the top I'm just gonna type the word stop there we go perfect I've got a stop sign let me select that and then I will double click to place that in the model if I press escape you can see that I've got the same editing controls that we have on a tree so you know the nice thing about infraworks if you know how to insert one thing you can insert everything because they all work the same way let me orbit this around let me back up there we go I'd like to insert another stop sign by this stop bar so let me go back to city furniture and you can see since I was grabbing a stop sign it's now showing me when it goes back to the library it's showing me other objects that are within that same category I'm going to grab the stop sign again let me double click to place that I'll press escape and then I can click and hold and we can kind of spin this around so it's facing the right direction let's add a car I'm gonna go back to city furniture and in the search box I'm going to start typing a vehicle and if I drag this up and down you can see the you know the number of vehicles that we have here let's drop the the blue compact car I'll select that and then I will double click and we'll place that in the intersection and when I hit escape you can see the exact same tools that we have here for the car that we have for everything else one more thing let's drop some people in I'm going to bring up the library again and I'll choose I'll just start typing people and if I drag this up or down you can see that we've got a lot of options here we'll click this one called Man 1 and we'll kind of put him next to the car you know maybe he's having some some difficulty with the engine and now he's standing waiting for maybe waiting for a tow truck maybe ok very easy to go through and populate our infraworks model with content that comes in in for works so knowing that knowing that I'm going to flip to another visualization I'll choose this one called final visualization and from here we will see a representation of the model after a bunch of items have been added if I back up let me I apologize for for the pixelization here if we have that if I back up you can see this I've added the cars I've got trees I've there's even little sample buildings in the library if you want to kind of lay out some existing buildings to try and you know visualize some of the existing conditions I'm gonna pan this over let me I'm gonna double click on my playground to try and jump over here quick there we go and then I'll back up and we'll let that catch up so here I've got a playground and it's got several little components on it these are all 3d parts you know maybe when you're fleshing out your model there's objects that are so specific to your model that you can't find them in the library well info Works allows us to Hort 3d content using several standard file formats some of the stuff you can grab you know online you get freely available online it'll import Sketchup files it'll import 3ds max you know the obj file format Dae FBX I can insert files that came from AutoCAD let's say in this case that there's a specific bench that I'd like to use with this playground and maybe the bench isn't available in the library if I have the AC collection you know in addition to in for worksite I can you know get into AutoCAD and I can draw this bench I'm gonna jump over to AutoCAD and here we've got you know a nice cross-section drawn in 2d of that bench geometry since I'm gonna be working in 3d I'm gonna open the workspace menu and I'll choose 3d modeling so this puts me in my 3d modeling environment and will then hold my shift key and the mouse wheel and I'll kind of orbit this up there we go I would like to convert this geometry into a 3d model let's look at how quickly we can do that we'll go to the Home tab and I'm going to start I'll take the geometry here that represents the legs and I'll extrude it I'll use the extrude command and I'll select these shapes and I'll pull this up a half a foot so I just extruded those let me orbit this a little bit I'm also going to change the visual style here to conceptual there we go now those objects reflect lights so you can see that they're they're solid objects now they are still separate these are two in you know distinct solid objects I'd like to fuse them together I'll do that by using the Union command and I'll just select both of these and I'll press Enter that just gives me one object so I have one leg now for my bench let's create the other leg I'll choose copy and I'll grab the leg there and I'll pick it up and maybe we'll copy this straight up a distance of 8 feet will say this bench is going to be around 8 feet long if i zoom out now we can see that other leg kind of floating up in the sky there these little rectangles near the leg these are going to be boards I'm going to extrude these to create the board's that represent the bench so let's choose extrude and I'm going to select those rectangles we'll extrude these up a height of 9 so they're slightly longer than the legs perfect and then lastly I'd like to kind of Center these boards on the legs to do that I'm going to change the visual style to x-ray just so I can see through these and then I'm going to say move and I'll select the boards I will pick them up from the midpoint between two points I'll grab the outside corner here and here and I'll place these to the mid between two points grab the end point here and down there there we go I'm trying to be mindful of the pixelization I want to move this around too much so there we go I've got my bench in position let's lay this down now I will select the bench and then I can use this gizmo to rotate this 90 degrees and then lastly I want to do one more thing if we look right here we can see the zero zero coordinate we can see where that's located that represents the insertion point of this bench this bench is going to be a lot like a block so I want to kind of Center the bench on that zero zero coordinate so I'm holding it from a predictable location I'm gonna do that by using the Move command and I'll select the bench and I'm gonna pick it up from the mid between two points and I'll grab these outer corners and I'm gonna place this to zero comma zero perfect let me orbit that that looks good I'll zoom in and then I'm going to change the visual style here to realistic because I'm gonna do one more thing I want to add materials to this AutoCAD comes with more than a thousand custom photographic photo-real materials so I can leverage those I can apply the materials on this geometry and then it will those materials will then be used and in for works if I go to the visualize tab I can choose materials browser and kind of like the library and info works you know I mean it's huge it's got a lot of stuff in here I can use this search box to find what I'm looking for I'm gonna type concrete and then I'll grab the concrete category let's come down I'll choose a flat boom gray I'll drag this into the drawing and then once it's in the drawing I'll drag and drop it onto these components perfect will clear the search next I'd like to paint these boards red so in the search box I'll type re D and then I will go looking maybe in the plastic category for materials containing that text string here's one called smooth red I'll drag this into the drawing and then I can drag and drop this onto a board now I can do that one at a time or I could select the boards first and then I can come over and click the material perfect let's clear that out and then I can close the materials browser so there's my bench okay just made in a couple minutes using AutoCAD to use this or to leverage this in infraworks I'm going to open the application menu and I will come down and choose I will come down and choose export and then I'll choose FBX I'm going to use that FBX FBX is kind of like a universal 3d file format I'm going to call this bench in fact the default here is fine we'll save this to my desktop as bench perfect I'm going to export selected entities we will export the objects and the materials and we want the materials embedded let me go ahead and click OK perfect so that bench has been exported let me jump out of AutoCAD at this point we won't save changes to this drawing and here and info works let me collapse some of this stuff to put in that bench we'll go to the Windows Explorer and I'm going to go to the desktop let's find bench that we just created I'll drag and drop this into the application and you can see that this object is coming in just like an object that was in the library I want to drop this in a city furniture if I go to the 3d model tab we can see the bench right there let me go to the geolocation tab I would like to place this using interactive placing I'm holding that bench at my cursor I'll just double click to place that in the model and I'll choose close and refresh so you can see if we if we do need a custom content we can create that content ourselves using AutoCAD we can pull that content from online if we want to you know search for it there if you have the AC collection there's another tool in there called formitz form it will allow you to create 3d models as well let's do one more thing I'd like a second bench now that I have this first one I could select it like it I could hit ctrl C to copy it to my clipboard and then I could hit ctrl V it's a paste and then I'll double click and I can put in one more so now I have two benches there we go I could take and rotate that so it's a little bit straighter and we could take and pull that out there we go that'll that'll work for now so real quick I was able to go through and create some custom content so now we'll say I've got my proposed design over here its fleshed out I've got everything looking nice I want to start creating visualizations for my meeting one way we can create visualizations in infraworks is by creating bookmarks a bookmark a bookmark is a saved view if you will if I open the bookmark menu here I've got one called soccer field if I click you can see it takes me right to that view I've got another book mark called proposed park if I select that you can see it takes me to that view so if I wanted to create a custom bookmark all I have to do let me zoom in I'll kind of set my view there and I'll say I'd like to save this I can then open my bookmark menu and choose add and then we can give us a name we'll just call this playground overhead and I'll press Enter from now on no matter where I am in the model no matter where I am in the model let me just pan this over just a little bit if I open up the bookmark menu I can choose that bookmark and go right back to that saved location so you know if you if you've ever created paper or printed exhibits to take to a meeting you know sometimes you don't always print everything that you need you could you could use the infraworks model as an exhibit at the meeting and if you know fo somebody asks a question about a particular component or phase of the project you can take an and and load a bookmark and go right to that space the nice thing is you have the entire model with you when you give the presentation so bookmarks are a fantastic tool next we'll we'll look at how we can create still images maybe we'd like to extract some images to put in a PowerPoint presentation for instance or or to print you know as a poster to put on an easel I am going to leverage the bookmark tool let me back this up and we'll we'll choose this one called prop Park maybe I'd like to create a still image of the park area to do that first thing I want to do is ensure that you know maybe the time of day or the or the the date you know I could go through and adjust some of the properties of the environment itself if I click the presentation button here I can come down and choose some and sky I can then drag the drag time you can see I can take and drag the the time of day this this is a nice tool for doing shadow studies by the way as long as we're doing that as long as we're dragging this I could also drag the date so I can get the the Sun and the shadows to be exactly what I need you know if they if they were very specific for a date and time if I push this up I can adjust things like cloud cover and wind speed okay if I want to adjust the the environment let me drag this down will drag the cloud cover down a little bit here too and I'll close that I'm gonna jump back to my bookmark to save this as a still image here in the presentation menu I am going to choose create snapshot I would like to save this to my desktop we'll call it a snapshot in fact let me look out here and see if I have one on here out here already no I do not perfect so we'll call that snapshot and I am going to export this at a resolution because I can enter whatever resolution I want will do 1280 by 720 pixels so it's going to be kind of a standard HD low HD resolution and I'll click Save and when it creates that you can see it just I mean it takes a second to do that let me bring up Windows Explorer and we'll go out to the desktop here and I will right-click on that snapshot and we'll open that up with Photoshop and take a look now when this comes up we can see the image you know at first glance you may look at that and think well you know you I could have done a screenshot okay that yeah that's something I could have done the the nice thing about doing the snapshot tool is it eliminates all of the interface items so it gives me a nice clean view of my model this would now be suitable you know this resolution might be suitable for a web page or some kind of online viewing as I click the zoom button to zoom in here you can see that very quickly we start to see artifacts and that's that's just a product of the resolution that we exported the nice thing let me minimize this nice thing about the snapshot tool is I can choose my whatever resolution I'd like to use let me go back to create snapshot so maybe I'd like to do a really high resolution image for a magazine ad or something like that I could do twelve thousand eight hundred by seven thousand two hundred pixels and I'll click Save it's exporting this at at ten times the resolution and you might think that would take a long time you could see it it happened rather quickly there let's go back to photoshop here and I'll choose open let's grab the new snapshot that was created I'll click to open that up and at first glance it looks you know very similar to what we had before but if I start to zoom in you can see that it's it retains its sharpness I can I can get in here pretty tight all the way down to where I can just about read the license plate on that vehicle you know if we really wanted to read it we could take and jack up the resolution even more so you have complete control over the resolution of the images that you extract just depends on purpose once you want to use them for let me close this the next thing I'd like to talk about is creating animation info works makes it very easy to create a like a fly through animation of your project I am going to load a bookmark again will load this one of the soccer field now when you first hear the you know concept of animation you think well that you may be thinking that's time-consuming or you know that's gonna be it's gonna require a steep learning curve you can create animations very easily and infraworks let me go to the presentation menu here again and I'll choose storyboard creator this is the tool that we use to build an animation and animation is essentially a chaining together of multiple animated cameras so let me I'm going to open this menu here we can see the the pre-made animated cameras that it comes with I'll choose an orbit animation and you can see that adds an item to my storyboard it's selected because it's you know bounded and red there if it's selected we can see the items properties over here to the right I can also see a play button that I can use to play that item if I press play we'll see it's doing exactly what it says it's rotating to the left or orbiting to the left 45 degrees I'd like to go a little bit further I'll choose 180 degrees and then I'll click play again I apologize for pixelization you the idea of what it's what it's doing here it's it's now orbiting 180 degrees although the duration is pretty quick we can see it's doing it over three seconds if I want to increase the duration when this item is selected I can click this up arrow each time I click it's going to increase it by a second you may have noticed that as I click this it's making the item longer here in the storyboard if I click and hold on the edge of this I can manually drag this out wherever I like storyboard also contains a playhead showing us where we are in the overall animation if I click and hold on that I can drag this back and forth to scrub through the animation let me hit play to play this again and we can see that it's now doing that hundred eighty degree orbit across a seven second time frame so this is the extent of my animation to this point now I could just add another camera movement if I open this menu I could choose add crane animation and let's take a look at what we get by default I'll just click play from here it's going to Crane up just like what we see there I'd like to crane down instead I can see it's gonna crane down about a hundred and eight feet let's click play I like that better so we orbit around then we come down at this point I'd like to fly through the model I'm going to do that by loading a path or creating a path I'll choose add camera path animation and infraworks basically saved my camera location here I can now manipulate my view in the model let me just orbit this up a little bit kind of like we're moving towards the playground and then I'll come down and click this Add button and it'll save the the location of my the current camera location it's saving these as keyframes let me drag this over I apologize for pixelization here let me click add let me do a couple more what kind of head up the hill here we'll do one more and then we'll kind of wrap things up by centering here on the roundabout let me click add so while that cleans up here in the storyboard we can see that we've got the the third item this item is made up of five different keyframes and you know if I click play let me do that if I click play despite the pixelization we can see what's happening in four works is threading a camera path through all of those saved keyframes to create a nice smooth animation from one side of the project to the other if I want to adjust the duration of this I can take and select when this item is selected I can choose keyframe one and if I drag down here I can assign a set speed you can see currently it's moving through that at 50 miles an hour I'd like to do it it may be 30 miles an hour and I'll press ENTER and you can see how that affects my my storyboard so let me drag this back to the beginning I'm gonna double click to put by to put the playhead back here and let's just create a quick title so we can see what this would look like I can add titles and captions using the icons here let me choose add a new title and you can see it creates kind of like it's a new item here in the captions and titles row I'll drag this up and I can type in my title here I'll say proposed roadway improvements and Park sight there we go and currently it's it's a got a black background I could take and make that transparent if I want to if I drag this down now if I click play here this play button will play the entire animation not just the the individual items so I can play and stop we can see the overall animation currently is about 30 seconds so if I click play you can see there's my title you can see the duration of that title it just faded out okay let me I'm gonna stop it at this point so we could go through and we could add titles and we could add captions to make the animations even more compelling if I want to save this animation I'm going to come down and click this export button this is how I can save this animation to a file such I could import it into a PowerPoint or maybe view it on a web page when the dialog box comes up I can select my desired encoder video encoder I can choose the folder and the file name I'd like to use for this file I can determine the number of frames per second I can output this at a custom resolution if I want to I can even export a portion of the storyboard out to an animation when I click record it would save that to disk so let me close this and then I'm gonna close this let's talk about one more concept you know it's one thing to show a still image it's another thing to show an animation we can also with with these tools with the AC collection I can create low-cost virtual reality I can physically put a stake holder inside this model such that they can see it in a 3d environment so what we'll do I apologize here let me do this quick kind of like ripping off a band-aid just gonna go here real quick and we'll let that kind of clean up there what I'm doing is now that I've got this model and it's it's ready to go I've zoomed out so that I can see it from a top view Here I am going to export this model such that I can open it up in Navisworks Navisworks is where we'll create the VR experience Navisworks as part of the collection let me just go to the Settings tab here and I'll choose export 3d model I want to export this using a bounding box I will click and then I'll come down and I can double click to represent the area of the model that's going to be my virtual reality experience now I'm not grabbing the whole thing I suppose I could if I wanted to you're just basically you're picking the amount of the model that you want to see in that VR environment so if I double click here I can choose the location where I'm saving the model you can see it's being exported as FBX that that Universal file format I can export this with the materials and the textures now I've already done that let me hit cancel and I'm going to jump over to Navisworks so I've exported that to FBX and then now Navisworks this this does clash detection it does 4d and 5d simulation we can add your aggregate files for many different can't plant forms and creates a BIM model another thing it does very well as it creates stereo panoramas if I go to open here right there you can see the FBX that I exported I've already opened that in Navisworks which created a Navisworks file just to make things quick here I'm gonna grab that otherwise might take you know two or three minutes to do this but if I open up one that's already been cached we can see that so you can see the model comes right over here two and four works and it retains all of the materials that it has in that it's that it brought over from info works so here in Navisworks we have everything we haven't lost anything what I want to do here is position myself where I'd like to be standing in this model in my virtual reality environment now since I have beat my round about here at the top of the hill and I have you know the park site and the playground here off in the distance maybe I don't want to be standing at sidewalk level because it's you know it would be a little bit hard to see that so what I'm gonna do is you know kind of I'm gonna kind of levitate here over the over the intersection let me pan this over a touch I'm gonna kind of levitate over the intersection here so that as I'm viewing this in 3d I'll kind of be up off the ground so that's all we have to do open the model position ourselves where we want to be and then I'll choose render and then I'll choose render and cloud I would like to render the 3d view current the current view for output type I'm going to choose stereo panorama now this is a cloud render service you can see that currently I can render a stereo panorama using the default settings and it's no cloud credits whatsoever not a not a charge so I could go through and I could you know render it take a look I could make adjustments if I want to and then if I wanted to dial this up all the way I could say make this final advanced exposure and then the highest resolution be 2046 pixels it's about 13 credits which translates to about 13 dollars and we can see it's gonna take less than 10 minutes to create that rendering I can click and it'll email me when it's when it's finished I would then choose start rendering and it would upload this to the cloud and take care of everything it has to do I am going what it's done I'll get an email then that's got a hyperlink in it and if I click the hyperlink it will show me the rendering that hyperlink would take me to the render gallery which is a shortcut to what I just clicked on there in the application by clicking render gallery and Navisworks I can go right there and we'll jump into this there we go I'll choose overall model here and from here I can view the models that have been rendered you know for this project to this point we know by the little kind of little you know goggles or binoculars there that this is a stereo panorama I'm trying to reduce pixelization here as much as possible this is a 360 degree panorama in its current state I can click and drag this to rotate around and see the entire environment I can look up down all around any place I want to if I want to view this in 3d I'll click this share button and then I would make sure that share via link is turned on I could then choose view shared link and here's my hyperlink right here that's really all you need to do this in 3d on a smart phone if you um I could take this link and I could copy it and I could send it to you in an email if you view that email on your phone tap that hyperlink you can then view this in 3d likewise it gives me the ability of using a QR code if you have a QR reader on your smartphone you can do this right now if you want to you could scan that QR code and it will load the rendering on your machine no special software necessary other than the QR reader now if you're if you are seeing that it's wanting you to purchase something or an ad or something like that that's your QR reader there's there's nothing needed for this whatsoever now I'm going to let's try this here I'm gonna see if I can simulate this on screen let me minimize this and this will minimize some of the things that we have going on here and I'm going to launch this application called reflector reflector will allow me to display my phone on my screen so now that I've got that up let me pull up my phone here and we'll see if we can send this over there we go so when it's when I first opened my phone up I'm viewing it and I'm holding my phone naturally vertically it tells me that all you have to do is turn the phone to a horizontal position and you can see now I have that stereo pair so if you've ever had a viewmaster as a kid you know the viewmaster was just a static image with this now that now that this is on my phone I could put my phone into a Google cardboard or there's a ton of VR devices low-cost VR devices that you can snap your phone into it's it's basically a holder with with some lenses on the front that allow you to view your phone kind of like binoculars and this is a full 3d experience so very very compelling and you know with the with the collection we can we can very easily create these type of visualizations you could use these for design meetings let me pop back out of this and I am going to return to my powerpoints here there we go so let's let's do this from the current slide perfect so just just to wrap up that last concept there with with the QR codes I mean it's you could take and print the QR codes on business cards you could put the QR codes in the newspaper you could have Google cardboards at public meetings and you could put the QR codes on a PowerPoint presentation so anybody that's at the meeting can can you know not only see your design but experience your design in 3d you know physically standing within the within the environment so today we have looked at a ton of concepts with respect to visualizing our infrastructure projects generally speaking we took a project that was we were working on in civil 3d we exported that over to infraworks both the surface and the geometry very easy to update either of those if the if the design changes once we got those into infraworks we were then adding landscaping and city furniture people cars street signs things like that I showed you how you could use auto cad in the collection to model custom content in the event what you're looking for in for works isn't in the library if it's not available you can always create your own or grab some online once you get the model into a state where you're ready to create visualizations you could use the model itself as an exhibit using bookmarks or we could create still images that are suitable for the web or magazine we could create fly through animations in a matter of minutes I mean if you've ever created animation with another application you know that that could be time-consuming especially in an application where it wants to render each frame individually and four works allows us to do it in just you know two minutes we also looked at how quickly we could create a low-cost VR experience without any special hardware or software necessary other than the collection and it's it's a VR that that anybody can view using their smart phone so that being said I'm gonna be sticking around to take questions at the close of the session I want to thank you guys for attending and and I hope to get a chance to work with you guys again in the future thanks a lot see ya

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 38,470

Keywords: Bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, Civil 3D, InfraWorks, AutoCAD, Navisworks, AEC Collection, advanced, workflow, visualize, animation, how to, tutorial

Id: QIklM6p7Q6I

Length: 58min 48sec (3528 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017