Bringing the Underground to the Cloud

STEPHEN MCDONALD: Hello, and welcome to our Bringing the Underground to the Cloud class for Autodesk University 2021. This class is coming to you by myself Steve McDonald, Courtney Hawkins, and Sean Hulbert.

My name is Steve McDonald. I'm a BIM Collaboration Lead with the alternative delivery group in Toronto, mainly working on large P3, transportation, and infrastructure projects in North America.

My experience in digital tools started in 2012. I started as a structural designer in the mining and metallurgy world using Smart Plan 3D, utilizing software to cut drawings from 3D elements and coordinate with other disciplines in a 3D environment. I then transitioned to the infrastructure world and began working on local roadway projects.

I began to teach myself how Civil 3D could help advance some of the workflows I had encountered to avoid the countless rework experienced on smaller projects. Through many failed attempts and numerous frustrating evenings at the screen, I eventually broadened my knowledge to where I could feel comfortable in passing on knowledge to other designers. This experience led me to become part of a BIM management team where we began to explore how to work with Revit and Civil 3D together to deliver projects with better quality, better coordination, and better efficiency.

The adoption of BIM 360 has been vital to our success story. And I am very keen on the platform and all the potential it has to offer in the construction world across all stakeholders of a major project.

COURTNEY HAWKINS: Hello, everyone. My name is Courtney Hawkins. I'm a transportation designer at AECOM Canada. I've been working in the transportation industry since graduating university four years ago. Although I'm relatively early on in my career, I've gained experience working on large transportation projects throughout Ontario.

These projects have led me to develop a knack for finding workflows and tools to collaborate effectively with large teams. I've had the opportunity to work closely with our AECOM BIM team and Autodesk on recent projects. And together, we have found ways to improve our project coordination, which we'll be sharing today.

SEAN HULBERT: Hello, everyone. My name is Sean Hulbert. I am a Senior Implementation Consultant for the Global Consulting Delivery Group here at Autodesk. And it has been my pleasure to work with Stephen and Courtney at AECOM over the last almost a year now on these workflows and processes that we've been putting together.

I actually come from industry. I spent nearly 25 years working in industry as a land development engineer and a transportation engineer and focused on transportation design. Six years ago, I came over to Autodesk and joined the consulting team just a little bit over a year ago.

I am a registered professional engineer in the state of Oregon. And I've been an Autodesk product user for 30 years now.

STEPHEN MCDONALD: Perfect. Thanks, everyone. So we are going to go straight in to just give an overview of the project. So today, we're going to present our BIM 360 hub, which we hosted our design for the Ontario Line South project. The Ontario Line project is a new underground subway project going underneath the heart of downtown Toronto.

The project will consist of seven new stations, one at grade portion connection to an existing GO station, and six new underground stations, two of which connect underneath two existing subway stations in downtown Toronto-- Osgoode station and Queen station. Our design team consists of many sub consultants across a variety of different time zones, so collaboration is a vital part of what we had to do well to achieve our goals in the design.

This is just an overview of the project showing downtown Toronto and the proposed subway line, including the new stations. So the technology stack-- one of our previous lessons learned in managing projects was to ensure that the technology stack was selected early and that the expectations for deliverables was established early so that the project began on the right foot digitally. Based on our previous experience, we decided to use BIM 360 Docs, as it was known then, as our common data environment.

Revit 2021 was selected to model all of the stations and the tunnel. All disciplines would host their models on BIM 360, and each station was separated into an individual project. This allowed the project team to manage permissions easily across the project and allow the design teams more flexibility in their work environment.

Finally, we decided to use Civil 3D 2021.2, which was a very important update. It was selected as our software for all civil files. It was the first time we had decided to host a Civil 3D project on BIM 360, as it was only recently possible with Autodesk and the release of their new, at the time, Desktop Connector.

We knew there would be some challenges and roadblocks ahead, but we were a determined civil group that could see the light at the end of the tunnel that showed us the promised land of being in the same space as the Revit models once and for all.

So, getting started. Once the decision was made to use the technology stack, it was vitally important to make sure that all CAD and BIM staff on the project were up to date with Revit, Civil 3D, and Autodesk Desktop Connector versions. Inheriting files from a client was a challenge at the beginning as we moved to the cloud platform. So cleaning the files that we had inherited became paramount to our success.

Ensuring that we held weekly meetings to allow staff to raise issues they were having with the speed of files and how to bring their sheets together correctly and moving the teams forward to host data shortcuts on our BIM 360 environments. Training was provided to make sure that the engineers were educated on how Desktop Connector was interacting with their local cache and also understanding the importance of the saved path of the XREF files.

COURTNEY HAWKINS: BIM 360 is a relatively new product and does come with a learning curve. This was the first project that we hosted all Civil 3D files on BIM 360, and we did experience a few challenges. However, these challenges were all lessons learned and things we can avoid in the future.

Since the majority of our design team had not previously used BIM 360, there was some training required at the beginning of the project. Teaching our team how to use BIM 360 tools was vital to our project success. This was also the first time that we stored and used data shortcuts on BIM 360.

We trained all designers on how to create and manage data shortcuts, which played a huge role in our project coordination. We experienced some challenges with Civil 3D file speed and saving back to the cloud. These issues could be traced back to a few common problems. First was files with a large number of audit errors and registered applications.

Next was files with broken references and files with references saved outside of BIM 360. Finally, large files caused some issues on BIM 360, but these were all challenges that we overcame throughout the project and how we overcame them are summarized on the next slide.

So overcoming challenges, we set up our project for success by scheduling regular calls with Autodesk to discuss any challenges we were facing. Through this regular communication, we were able to develop skills that allowed our project to run smoothly. From experience, we have developed a list of best practices when it comes to managing CAD files on BIM.

To start, it is important to keep software up to date, such as Civil 3D and Desktop Connector. We have also found that having sufficient local hard drive space is important to BIM 360 performance. Next on the list is file maintenance.

BIM 360 likes clean CAD files and does not appreciate broken references, so it's important to stay on top of file maintenance. Another tip is to regularly purge and audit files and clean any inherited files before uploading to BIM 360.

And in order for us to identify these issues, we used both the Health Checker and Reference Explorer. These tools can scan files to find any issues within files or XREFs, and they'll both be discussed later. Finally, I'll mention that you can rest easy knowing that BIM 360 regularly saves backup files, so even when a problem occurs, data is never lost.

STEPHEN MCDONALD: Thanks, Courtney. So learning through practice. So the pandemic affected everyone across the planet. How design teams pivoted to work remotely and utilizing teams to increase communication was exceptional on a project of this scale. We were cognizant to constantly hold daily and weekly check-in meetings, sharing screens, and talking through issues with certain files that were starting to show signs of slowing. And we worked closely with Autodesk to identify issues early and mitigate any issues to avoid major problems later in the project.

Civil 3D 2021.2 and BIM 360. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about how the BIM 360 common data environment platform helped our teams work and communicate more effectively. One of the first things that was a big benefit on a project of this size was, hosting our DWG files on BIM 360 allowed our team access to view the files online. This helped reduce the total number of users opening AutoCAD software to do simple tasks thus lowering costs to the project.

Utilizing BIM 360 Docs as a host for the PDF drawings. Project standards problems were allowed to be highlighted early on in the process. Utilizing functionality in BIM 360 and training the project teams how to use the tools to successfully QAQC drawings using the markups tool functionality and the version control for back checks, utilizing the issues functionality between the design teams to request information and track items to closure, version and control of the drawings themselves to ensure no data was lost, and all files were easily recoverable and reinstated on the project.

So data shortcuts and pipe networks on BIM 360. So this was the first project where we attempted to host our data shortcuts on BIM 360 based on new updates in Desktop Connector. So the civil teams on the project agreed to host their data shortcuts for the project on BIM 360. Surfaces, track alignments, pipe networks, and pressure pipe networks were all posted to the same data shortcuts project folder and managed on the cloud.

Similar to the referencing of CAD files into another file, the reference path of the data shortcuts became an issue that would require some support from Autodesk but ended up being resolved relatively quickly. Data referencing the surface file became a challenge on the project as the surface file was quite large. Working with Autodesk, we arrived at a solution where this surface was data shortcut in as a reference only. We experienced a much smoother experience working within the files including a marked reduction in file size.

We successfully utilized the data shortcuts folder to create container files of any proposed works that could be shared in model coordination on BIM 360 to allow our design teams to view their 3D elements with the stations and tunnels, Revit models, in a federated model.

So I'm going to stop the presentation here for a second and do a little live demonstration on how we utilized BIM 360 plan section to manage our drawing files on the cloud. So I'm just simply uploading a PDF here. I have a title block set up that's going to read the sheet number off the sheet and the title of the sheet.

And this process is pretty quick. You can do it for single PDF files, or you can do it for multiple combined PDF files. What will happen is it'll break out all of your sheets into individual sheets based off the sheet number, which is the most important part of the document. So this sheet number here is basically the governing factor of this document and what version it is.

So I'm just going to use this button up here to publish this sheet to BIM 360. And what's happening here is if you had combined PDFs, it would separate everything out into an individual PDF. And how we utilize this on a project is, we set up our folder structures under the plan section that whatever submittal date that we had targeted, we would ask our design teams to post their drawings two weeks before our official submission date. And our quality management team agreed to include our workflows in their quality management plan. So everybody worked in the cloud environments to mark up the drawings and use the versioning control on BIM 360 to QAQC our drawings.

So you can see that the PDF is populated in our Live Demo folder. The sheet number has been read off the sheet. You can see the version, the time it was uploaded, and who it was uploaded by.

So typically, what we asked our teams to do was to-- the discipline leads, package leads, project managers, whoever needed to come in and provide markups on the drawings, they come in, utilized the markup functionality in BIM 360. And it's important to make sure that your markups are published. So on the left-hand side, you can see markups are time stamped with my name, the date, and that it's published.

And then you would simply-- so when the design teams then finish their review, it's the exact same format for how to upload a sheet. Same thing, select the title block. It's going to read the same sheet number, and it's going to version up that document on the cloud. And then, this helped our teams with versioning control.

So basically, what would happen then is the designers would post their new drawings with the changes that they've made on the sheets. The project managers, the discipline leads, whoever needed to sign off on the sheet would come in and make sure that the changes had been made. And then they would be able to approve the sheet, basically, to be submitted.

So you can see here, the sheet loads with my wonderful dad joke here. And just another benefit of hosting our documents online on BIM 360, specifically, with the compare tool, so as we go through the design phases of the project, it's useful to identify changes specifically for a bill of quantities, things like that.

So when you use the Compare Document tool and you identify the changes between the sheets, the slider bar will show you the newer version on the left-hand side, the older version on the right. And you can kind of slide in between the drawings, or you can go back to the overlay that will show you the new version of the sheet in red and the old version of the sheet in blue.

So if I go back to our presentation-- so coordinating with Revit. One of the big challenges on the project was figuring out the workload to coordinate seamlessly between Civil 3D and Revit utilizing the BIM 360 platform. So it was very important to ensure all the civil files were using the designated project coordinate system.

Once that was set up, we needed to set up shared coordinates in the Revit models to ensure that they align geospatially with the civil files. Once we had tested everything and made sure everything was good to go, we requested weekly exports from the Revit teams to a folder location on BIM 360.

The export was to include a cleaned view and to be exported with the correct units and with shared coordinates turned on. The file name remained the same on all exports, and the file was versioned up every time it was exported, allowing for Civil 3D sheet files to update automatically and also provide a historical log of all changes made in the exports over time.

So this is just a little slide that shows our model coordination space. So we had our container file set up with our surfaces and with our utilities that were created from pipe networks. So essentially, we data short-cutted in pipe networks into an empty CAD file, very clean. All you could see was the pipe networks.

And then you can see here that we're loading in some architectural and Revit models and structural Revit models for two different stations. And then, we also had tunnel Revit models. And this is all on Google Chrome here that we're looking at.

So we're zooming in right in downtown Toronto. You can see our surface file. You can see a bunch of utilities. If you double-click on an element in Model Coordination, it becomes the center of your rotation, which is very useful to help you navigate the reviews. You can see an existing station there. You can see the proposed design of the station underneath.

You can see the tunnels, and you can see the utilities all in a federated environment together. This is a large utility that's been there since the '60s, I think, so how we modeled this was a mixture of record information from drawings. And we also received LiDAR information from the client to double-check the accuracy of the model that we had created.

And typically, what we would do in this situation is we wouldn't have the surface turned on. It's too large to operate. So it's very easy to come into this Model Coordination space and turn things on and off.

We also had received some LiDAR files from the client. So it was interesting once we had all of our Revit models geospatially coordinated and our pipe networks geospatially coordinated, they worked seamlessly with the LiDAR files that we had received from the client. So it's interesting to see everything meshed together in a 3D environment. And now I'll pass it over to Sean to talk about the Reference Explorer.

SEAN HULBERT: Thank you, Stephen. So with the release of Desktop Connector version 14.10, there was a new tool that was added to the Desktop Connector environment. And what this tool gives you the ability to do, it gives you the ability to evaluate the dependencies that are in your Civil 3D or AutoCAD files. And so what you're seeing here, I believe you-- go ahead and st-- thank you, Stephen.

So what we'll do here is we're going to look at Reference Explorer, which is a tool that was added in Desktop Connector version 14.10. And what Reference Explorer gives you the opportunity to do is evaluate dependencies that are inside your AutoCAD or Civil 3D drawings. And those dependencies could be external references or data references.

And so what you'll see me do here is, I've navigated to the Autodesk docs folder. And I'm navigating to my project where my files are uploaded. You'll see that I have a migration example here, and I'll jump into the sheets files, and you'll see that I've synchronized my street plans.

Now, once I've synchronized the street plans, I can go down to my Desktop Connector, right-click on Desktop Connector, and you'll see right above Pending Actions is Reference Explorer. Once you open up Reference Explorer, you'll then have the opportunity to either drag and drop a file, or we can use the Browse for Files option or the Open option to load those files from BIM 360.

I'll just drag and drop it for us here. And what you'll now see is, once Desktop Connector has analyzed that file, you'll start to see that any of the dependencies that are within that file or the dependencies that are missing and should be inside that file. And why this is important is this lets you know that for every file that's missing it is required to time out.

And so now, if we go over into the tree view, you'll see that I can start to minimize my list and dig down and find out exactly where that dependency was missing. And so you'll see that what we're showing is the entire list of dependencies and their dependencies within our street plans drawing. And so right here, you can see in our storm drawing, we're missing a couple of development files and a sanitary file.

We can immediately go to fix those files right inside BIM 360. The other important part about Reference Explorer is you can leverage this tool on a project that's stored on a server or even stored locally. It has use beyond just BIM 360.

And so the next part here that we want to talk about, and Courtney had alluded to this as well, is the importance of keeping our drawings healthy. Really eliminating anything that you could potentially be causing us heartaches in those drawings or creating an environment where those drawings open slower, such as Stephen had mentioned, making our surfaces data short-cutted in as reference only gives us the opportunity to cut the size of the drawing by a factor of 10 in most cases.

But you'll also see here that we have to sanitize our drawing. So as we go through our Civil 3D Checker, what we can see is that if we have a excessive number of layers, it can cause delay in our files. If we have an excessive number of annotation scales, these are just the primary AutoCAD elements that we're looking at.

And so if we look at the next slide, you'll see that in this environment, you could start to break down how those individual analytics that we extracted from the drawing are impacting the work or impacting the time it takes for your files to open or even save. So if you look down here on the weighted fitness score at the bottom, you'll notice, and Courtney even mentioned this, registered applications significantly impact the speed of your drawings.

And if we take a look at our next slide, you'll start to see how we can break that information down based on, now, the Civil 3D element. So now we've first taken a peek at our AutoCAD elements. Now we've moved over, we're looking at now-- you'll see that there's quite an excessive number of Civil 3D objects in these drawings.

And the reason that is is because when we were putting together our model for the existing condition scenario, we needed to include information that came from two-dimensional drawings. So Stephen leveraged a class that was taught last year at Autodesk University, and we even advanced that particular workflow a little more for our uses. And then, we were able to get those existing conditions built in a way that we could actually start to use our Model Coordination tool.

And then, if we look at the next slide, you'll see that we break those individual elements down into how they're going to impact the drawing. And so you'll see that the more Civil 3D objects you have in the drawing, the longer it could take for those drawings to open. Now we do realize that there are times where we get very large files, especially when we're working on a very large rail project in downtown Toronto.

And then, on the next two slides, what we'll see is actually the impact of time-to-open versus each of the analytics that we were measuring our drawings against. And so this is a tool that is available to Autodesk customers through consulting engagements, and we can actually give you the feedback to help you understand where and how your drawing's performance can be improved.

And we get a lot of questions at Autodesk as far as how often should I audit my drawings. What I find is a good practice is I approach it like you change your oil. Every once in a while, every 3,000 miles, we change our oil. We get into a rhythm, and we do that.

Same thing with purge and audit. Just get into a rhythm every once in a while. You'll find that sweet spot. But then, if there's any problems with our car, the first thing we might do is go check our oil if the check engine light comes on.

So treat your drawings and treat cleaning your drawings the same way. If you find out that your drawing is not behaving well, then check it out with Reference Explorer and find out if there's missing dependencies. If there are not, then let's look at the drawing and audit and purge it, and let's find out if there's extraneous data that's in there that might be causing bloat.

STEPHEN MCDONALD: I think they're all great points, Sean. I think that was one of the biggest learning curves that we had as a design team was that, sometimes, when you start your career, nobody takes the time to explain the backend of how Civil 3D is working. And when we moved up and decided to move all our files onto the cloud, there was a very quick learning curve as to our team understanding what was in the background of our files that was going to cause us trouble in the future.

And it was very interesting to learn together as a group and experience the challenges that we experienced but also working with Autodesk, and Sean particularly, to overcome these challenges, and now what we've managed to do is build a base of a team that can-- we know how to fix our own files. So if somebody new comes into a project, we don't have to submit a ticket to Autodesk anymore.

We are able to provide our own internal support to a certain point. And that's really beneficial for how we want to move forward as a group and how we want to keep pushing forward with operating our projects on the BIM 360 cloud with Revit and Civil 3D in the same environment.

So I guess just to wrap this one up, Courtney, I'm just going to ask you if you could give a brief insight into your experience with working with Civil 3D and BIM 360 because you are in the files every day, and you're doing the hard yards in the files.

COURTNEY HAWKINS: Absolutely. So overall, I've had a really positive experience working with BIM 360. This is now my third project that I've worked on that has used BIM 360 Docs to some extent. And I think the biggest benefit for me, as a designer, is that everything's stored in one place, so we can store all our CAD files, all our background information, and this even includes all our markups. So there's no need to have markups saved in one folder here and one Excel here and one email here.

And then, I've also found a lot of time-saving tricks that you can use in BIM 360. So one example is that non CAD users can open up CAD files directly in BIM 360, and this saves me a lot of time from plotting and PDF-ing drawings.

STEPHEN MCDONALD: Absolutely. That's another benefit to it, where our design leads can come in and open our DWG sheet files in BIM 360 and provide a markup directly on the DWG file. We don't need to spend time printing or wasting time doing that. And then maybe Sean, I might just lean to you for a minute here, and maybe you can share some insights on best practices for how to start to migrate to BIM 360 as a host for Civil 3D if you were trying to start a new project.

SEAN HULBERT: Absolutely. Thank you, Stephen. So, you know, we've said this a couple of times during the call. I think you've heard all of us say this at least once, and I'm going to keep saying it-- clean drawings are your best friend in any cloud environment. It doesn't matter where the cloud environment is. Any extraneous data that you're pushing up to the cloud is just taking more time.

BIM 360 prefers a robust bandwidth when you're leveraging the information coming from the cloud, so you don't want to be hooked up to maybe a hotspot. You definitely want to have a fair amount of bandwidth when you're leveraging this particular tool in this environment.

The other thing I'll let you know is start clean, have a plan, make your BIM execution plan, and have the conversation, so you have-- you are prepared for any deltas that might come your way. Everybody needs to make sure that they're running the latest and greatest of the software that's available because there are always little enhancements that are coming down the pipe.

For example, with some of the new information that was just released, you can now, in File Explorer, open up your BIM 360 environment directly from File Explorer, right-click and open the file up in the cloud. So there's always enhancements coming. But there's also things that are being made better for the end users behind the scenes, as well.

STEPHEN MCDONALD: Perfect. Thanks very much, Sean. And thank you very much, Courtney. So just to let everybody else know that if you are looking for a deeper dive, please watch out for our other class, where we'll delve into some of the workflows a bit more in depth. And we can conclude our presentation here. So we'll open it up for Q&A.