Build Custom Parts for Use in AutoCAD Civil 3D and InfraWorks

STEVE HILL: How's everybody doing? Ready for AU?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

STEVE HILL: All right. Good to hear. How many people is this your first AU? That's great. I've heard a lot of first timers here. So welcome. Hope AU is everything that it has been for myself and others out here have been here numerous times.

So with that, we'll go ahead and get started here. My name is Steve Hill, and this class is Build Custom Parts for Use in AutoCAD Civil 3D and InfraWorks. I'm a CAD manager and civil designer at Geosyntec Consultants in Chicago, and then I'm also a .net app developer for the app store. I write apps for AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and map 3D, and things like that.

Went wrong way. All right. So some of the things we're going to cover here in this class is the new Infrastructure Parts Editor software. We're going to learn how to build some custom parts. Well, we'll model one part, but the focus on this class is going to be using Inventor and how to manage that. The Infrastructure Parts Editor will show how to bring in the part into there and link it up with other kind of create your assembly and then how to publish that. So the Inventor is the parametric shape content where you would build that, and then Infrastructure Parts Editor is your software that manages your catalog.

A little bit about my background. I mentioned briefly I've got 17 years with Autodesk products, an array of civil side design. Most recently over the last five, six years it's been more natural gas industry and landfill, but I do come from a traditional civil background doing stormwater and things like that. And so that's kind of where my part knowledge has come in. And then also my LLC with writing apps and things like that.

All right. So an overview of the Infrastructure Parts Editor here. How many of you have used Part Builder and tried to build custom parts in Civil 3D? All right. How many like Part Builder? Yeah, not very many. Inventor is very similar to Part Builder. I mean, you getting better graphics obviously and things like that. But the concept behind it is very similar.

So as you start to learn Inventor, if you're familiar with Part Builder, you'll say, oh, I remember doing some of that in Part Builder. So it Infrastructure Parts Editor doesn't necessarily take Part Builder away. Part Builder is still there. You may need to come back to it. Obviously some of you probably have massive catalogs of your own parts that you've built and whatnot.

So that'll still be in the software. So the Infrastructure Parts Editor or IPE as I'll call it here is the parametric shape editing tool that reads the Inventor file that has the parametric definition, and it manages your catalog and it helps you push out these parts for use in your model in InfraWorks or Civil 3D. IPE graduated this year from the Autodesk Labs. It was Project Kameleon. Anybody familiar with Project Kameleon?

OK. Good. So you'll have a better understanding here. And actually when I submitted this class for AU I didn't know they were going to graduate it. I had actually prepared this off of Kameleon, so I had to kind of revamp things a little bit on how I was going to do this.

So some of the IPE terminology. If you're familiar with Civil 3D, this terminology will make complete sense for most. But I wanted to put it in here because some people still struggle with this and the concept behind it. So you have an overall part catalog and then inside that catalog are families of parts.

So you might have a catch basin part or a manhole part, and there's different sizes that belong inside that family. So that's what the family holds those sizes with the same general shapes. The catalog houses all these families. Inside of Civil 3D you have, let's say, for pipe networks, you have a kind of condensed catalog for just that drawing of what's being read. So you're not having to look at the entire catalog all the time.

So IPE uses this same concept here. How do I get into IPE? Windows Start. You can find it in Infrastructure Parts Editor, typing that in under Autodesk. I'm told that's not the best way to start it. It's recommended to be started from Civil 3D or InfraWorks, though I haven't experienced any real issues from starting with the other way.

But you can find it in InfraWorks under the storm sewer, that circle that kind of looks like a pipe end button. And then there's a great icon. And that's the icon that launches IPE. In AutoCAD Civil 3D you do have to have 2018.1 installed, and then it's where you would find your Part Builder button on your create design panel and then select the dropdown, click the Infrastructure Parts Editor button. It's directly under the Part Builder button.

IPE has three tabs. It's pretty basic. You have your catalog tab for selecting your catalog, which catalog you want to work with, and then you have your parts tab and that's where you do all your editing, and then you have a publish tab and that's for publishing your catalog.

So the catalog tab again, utilized to manage your catalogs for Pipe Networks, Pressure Networks. It can also be used for managing Bridge components, and I think there's a few other things that it's offered for supporting. This class I'll be focusing mostly on the Pipe Network side here. I'll kind of cover a little bit about the other side of it.

But just to mention here on this first screen you could see there's a structured domain and then a piping domain. And when I first got into this, this was a little bit confusing because I'm thinking Pipe Networks, I'm thinking structures and pipes. But it's not. The structure domain is primarily Pipe Networks, the piping domain is your Pressure Pipes domain.

So think of it that way. And I will say that the structure domain is what it sounds like. It's just structures that passes into Civil 3D. You cannot pass pipes into Civil 3D. You can pass them in InfraWorks, but not to Civil 3D from the structure domain.

The parts tab. Once you get to over to the parts tab, at the bottom left hand corner there's three buttons. It's assembly, structure, and culvert. So under this structure you have three classes. You have a surface structure, an underground structure, and your grates and covers. And so those three components combine together to make your structure.

Under the colvert class, which again, only passes to InfraWorks, you have pipes or culvert barrels and an end treatments, such as an energy dissipator or something like that. So those combine together to create an assembly for your pipe object.

Under assembly we have two base component types inlets or access structures or culverts. And that's your assembled components from I mentioned above there. Again, on the parts tab if we get into structures a little bit more, surface structures are your primary controlling feature. So as we build our assemblies it's going to ask you for your surface structure initially and then you're going to pick your underground structure and your grate to combine in with that.

They're used to place the part on the surface or your primary controlling object in the model. It includes the frame and where the cover grate attaches, it includes the connection of the underground structure. Your underground structure's the base component, everything that's underground. And then your grate or covers just sits on top of the surface structure.

So they've kind of broken down that way so that you can swap out your grate or cover. So if you wanted to show inlet openings or just a manhole cover you can do that. This side of it, obviously, from a Civil 3D standpoint, this doesn't matter as much because we're not going to see this kind of graphics. But in InfraWorks, it does so you actually can see these details in your model.

From the parts tab again, the culvert section, IPE comes out of the box with just a circular pipe and a rectangular pipe. If you want to get into arch pipe and things like that you would have to model that in Inventor and pass it into here. Again, the Civil 3D side you're still going to use Part Builder for your pipes if you want to create new pipes for the time being at least. I don't know if there's any plans of implementing that in the future.

So some of the culvert end treatments I would love for this to be able to pass over into Civil 3D, but as we all know Civil 3D uses just structure objects, so the object type is a little bit different. But this will pass here into InfraWorks for better visualization in your InfraWorks models.

The assembly section. Again, I mentioned inlet or access structures. Combine surface structure, underground structure, and grate or cover, and then the culverts. And then your Publish tab is fairly simple. There's just one button to publish. You have to go through and select which part families you want to publish so you can make smaller condense catalogs if you don't want a massive catalog.

Notice up in the upper right, and I'll show this too, there is a select all or de-select all. So that's helpful so you don't have to go through the list. And then when you publish you choose whether or not you want to publish to InfraWorks or Civil 3D. And then you can actually publish directly to a model in InfraWorks, or you can publish your overall catalog. And then Civil 3D only does to the catalog.

All right. So modifying some of the existing content provided in the Parts Editor. It does come with a number of parts that you can use. And so we're going to jump into IPE and show some of that here. I'm just going to start it from start and I'll jump into this generic drainage catalog that they provide you with. And I would mention that you'll want to make a copy of this just so you don't lose this catalog or overwrite it or whatnot.

So let's go and open this. And then the first thing I'm going to do is come up to the upper left and just hit Save As. And we'll call this a AU 2017. And then the catalog, you can choose imperial or metric. The catalog has to be all imperial or all metric. There's no mixing there.

So they do give you a metric catalog as well. I don't know why it didn't install for me on this one. But it does show up on another computer that I have. So if you need that. So then down in the lower left you have those three buttons I mentioned, the assembly, structure, and colvert. So as we switch through these you can see that the parts update so that you see the full assembly and then the structure, you have the-- again, click on the surface structure.

Here's just the surface structures, underground structures, and then grates or covers, and then these are the families underneath. So if you want to edit one of these, and let's do that, and we'll do that for our example here. I'm going to use this rectangular frames or slab because we're going to build a part that connects onto that.

So when you get in here you click on one, you see the part family properties. You can change the family name if you wish to do so here. And click Next. Here's the shapes that define that part. So these are all the models that were developed in Inventor that were provided with the software. So you could choose the shape here and then you can give some more detailed information.

The only stuff that you have to fill out are the ones with the screen icon. All the rest of this is just at your own preference if you want. It's helpful. So I would recommend filling it out, but it doesn't have to be there. Then basically on the part editing side, you get a table. And you're probably thinking, well, this is a pain to edit in here, but you can export this to Excel.

And so you could take this right into Excel, it will save it to a specific location on your hard drive, you open that Excel file in that location, make your edits, and then this import from Excel will highlight and you can click that, it'll read it from that location and import both parts. So it's much easier to make your edits in here.

But this table basically includes your part size local name, the size. These two columns are what you see inside of Civil 3D, for example, and you're looking at a part and picking it out of a catalog. And some of you that are familiar with Part Builder, you've seen some of this already and how Part Builder works. It's very similar to this.

So you have these starred categories. These are your categories that you have to enter in in order for the part to model properly. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going add a size here for this example. So I'm just copying from the previous one. So I can add rows or I can just click in the blank row and start adding one. So I'm going to call this 78 by 48 for the part that we're going to make later.

We'll leave the same frame, and then we'll carry on down over here and we'll just enter the zero for the gutter slope to have over zero. The SS length, and that stands for surface structure length, so this would be 78 by 48, and then I'm going to use the same height, 8 inches, wall thickness, let's leave 1 inch.

CG length, that's your covert grate length. So I'm going to leave that the same, 36, 24 for CG width, CG height, I'm going to leave that as 2. Your SP length, that's structure port. So we'll get into more about this, but when you connect up these parts, some of these variables are very important, especially if you want to design a part that is going to match up with this existing catalog content. Because, when you design these, it uses these parameter names to link things up and figure out where it's at.

So in this case, I will tell you that, in this catalog, the way it was designed, you have a surface structure length and width, and then the port is the connection point. So in your underground structure, you have to have port in there. When I was first doing this, I was trying to link it up with SS length or it wasn't working. It's the structure port that needs to be linked up. And that's how out of the box most of these parts are designed with these same parameters.

And I've got a list of detailed in the handout as well as in the PowerPoint here. So I'm going to use 78 for the length for the SP width, 48, for the flange thickness we're going to use one. And now that part is in there. Next, we can hit the Next button here, and we'll go to the size validation.

So what you see here is you see a little preview on the right of what the part will look like and your table of sizes that are offered. All right. So then I can come over here and I can start clicking through and you can see kind of a nice 3D rendering of the actual part. And as I pick different sizes you can see it get stretched and modeled according to those sizes that I entered in.

So there's my new part that I'm going to connect onto for underground oil water separators what I'm going to model. So pretty cool. So these highlighted points you see on here are what are called reference points. In Inventor we can assign those reference points. My understanding from in the InfraWorks side you're supposed to be able to snap to some of these.

I don't know if that's available on the Civil 3D side or not yet. But you can move the structure by those points, which is nice. But that's what those are. One thing I wanted to mention here as well, let's back up a step here on this part editing. If you're not familiar with how this part was defined and what these lengths are, you do have a little dimension image here that shows you what those lengths are. And you can pop this out and move it around your screen. Put it on another monitor or stretch it and see what those sizes are defined.

All right. So that is a helpful point there. Let's click Next and Done. So our part is ready. Same thing on the assembly side. If we get into doing assemblies, let's take a look at that. Let's go to inlet access structure. So on the assembly we have our base type.

So here when you're working with inlet access structures you only get the surface structure as your base type. If you're working on the culvert side for InfraWorks, you get the Piper culvert base, and then you're picking your surface structure shape that you want to start with. And then on the components side, the surface structure will be filled out, underground structure, and then your grate or cover you're kind of just moving things over automatically.

So this surface structure has a cover already built into it, so it didn't need to be added. And then detailed properties that you can fill out, and then, again, your size validation. And you can see the part here. And so if we went through and added additional sizes for both the surface structure and the underground structure, we could make this structure show up at different sizes.

As long as those sizes link up between the two you can add additional sizes to be able to pick out of your catalogs. So that's the overall concept behind this and how this works. It's just to help build your catalogs and add more part sizes. So if you publish this catalog out for use, then you need another size, you just come in here, make sure your sizes are all entered in, republish out the catalog and you're ready to go. From the Publish tab, here's our Publish button. Go ahead and select that. So you would go through and pick all what families you want, again, select all, select none, click Next. And then here's this dialogue where you can publish to your shared content folder or directly to an InfraWorks model if you want and then your Civil 3D location.

So it's going to default to your default location. I believe you should be able to publish this to another location if you want. The key point that they put under here, if you change the location you may not be able to see the catalog. And that's due to, you can change your catalog path in Civil 3D and where things are read from.

And I believe you need to have an existing catalog there ready to go as well before you publish to it. All right. So let's go back to the PowerPoint. So creating custom content. And here's the kicker. To create your own custom content you must have Autodesk Inventor. And currently as it stands Inventor does anybody have Inventor? Purchased Inventor?

OK. A few people have. So it's not in any of the suites if you own a suite. Inventor's not there and it's not in any of the collections for the Civil side. So it is an additional purchase, but last I checked you can rent Inventor. And you really only need LT. You don't have to have the professional level. But I think it was right around $50 a month. Don't quote me on that, but take a look at the website.

So the idea is you could rent it, build several parts out for a couple of months or whatever, get your parts in there, and then IPE you can add all the additional sizes once you have your shapes modeled. So you don't really need Inventor long term theoretically if you get your parts modeled in there what you need.

Inventor is a bit different than AutoCAD, but if you've done 3D modeling in AutoCAD, the concept is the same as far as using a Cartesian coordinate system. Everything's kind of tied to a central point and then it's perpendicular off of there in a three dimensional space. Work planes are big in Inventor. They were big in Part Builder in understanding how work planes work.

It's a bit easier to follow in Inventor than it was in Part Builder. So your templates default with three planes: your YZ, XZ, and XY planes all tie to the center point. And then other work planes can be added. You can offset a work plane if needed, you can add a work plane to a face of the model, things like that.

Sketches are your 2D components. So you're kind of defining your 2D sketch. And the sketches have to be tied to a work plane or a face of a model. And then parametric constraints. That's the biggest point here with Inventors to be able to resize these parts quickly and that's where those tables come in. So we're having a table of sizes, and that shape will change itself based on the sizes we enter in.

So we need to make sure we put parametric constraints in the Inventor model. And there are 3D objects. We're selecting a profile or a section from the 2D drawing. I'll show you exactly what that is to extrude or to rotate or whatnot. And you're defining, again, additional parameters that control the 3D extrusion of these objects.

So when creating the custom content in IPE it does not come with an Inventor template that is set up correctly. There are a few things that you need to know to do. The top view, if you think from a civil standpoint, elevation is our Z axis going up and down. So we need to make sure our Z axis is rotated correctly.

When I first got into this I wasn't aware that Inventor was set up differently. So I actually modeled some parts wrong, but that's one thing that you want to get switched otherwise your parts could come in laying down on their side versus vertical. And I'll show you how to set up that template.

And there are some other things you can do. You could set up a template with your default parameter names that you want to have set up and ready to go just so you don't have to remember looking at a sheet. If you want to do that you could some default work planes set up in there and whatnot. And we'll go through that here.

So the parameter names, this is one key point, and the table's a little bit bigger. I don't know how big it is on that screen. I guess that's not too bad. But in the handout it's there. But these are the preferred parameter names. So again, if you look at this, it's kind of hard to see here, I'll try to read it from out here. Your surface structure up at the top, we have the SS length and whatnot.

Down at the, I believe I put it at the bottom, is the structure port. So the ones with the double stars are the ones that link between the three models. So the structure port and the CG for cover grate. That's how those models link up if you're wanting to build and tie in with the custom content, which is the recommended way to use it, or the out of the box content I should say.

If you don't do this, you'll be struggling for hours trying to figure out how to get this to link out. So hopefully I can save you some time doing that. All right. So the other aspect that you need is the Infrastructure Part Shape Utilities plugin for Inventor. You can find it on the environment's tab. Once you click that button, you'll get a contextual ribbon that pops up with some new tools on it for Inventor to define where these port connections are.

All right. One thing I'll mention is the order of installation matters. I found this out as I was setting up a new computer for this presentation. I had Inventor installed at the end and I had first installed InfraWorks or 2018.1 Civil 3D, and when I got into Inventor the Infrastructure Part Shape Utilities was not there.

So I ended up having to uninstall 2018.1 and reinstall it, and then it showed up. So just keep that in mind if you do run into that, but just uninstall/reinstall the update to get this installed. All right. So next, let's get into Inventor and let's live model this oil water separator.

OK. So when you first open Inventor you'll see a screen like this. So Inventor you have the ability to do parts and assemblies. IPE will do your assemblies for you, so you don't really need to worry about this. There's also some other really cool things that you can do with this that I've been thinking about. And once you get these parts modeled you can create your details right from these parts if you have them in Inventor. You can create a detail sheet and pull off your 3D model.

It's impressive in how fast it is to show a section through your part and things like that. You can kind of see a little graphic here where I'd done one. And if we have some time at the end I'll show you. So let's go ahead and start a part. And the template that I wanted to mention, if we look down here in the lower corner you have your UCS and we see the YX and we're kind of looking through the Z, but we're at our front view. So if I switch this to top view we're looking down on the y-axis.

So if I go back to front view all you need to do is come in and say, leave it on front view, hold down and say Set Current View As, and set it as the top. So now we're looking at the top. And if I rotate this view cube, now you can see the Z axis. So that's the front of the object. So that's one key thing you'll want to do.

The other thing I like to do in my template is I like to have it start out with the planes turned on. So over on the left you have, if you're familiar with Civil 3D you have a tool space, so this is your model browser. And it's very similar to how tool space works. This is what you would be finding out about your model and being able to access different components to your model quickly is through this model browser.

So you do have this origin folder that contains your center point, your axes and your planes. So I like to turn these on just so I have them ready. And then I like to have it set up in kind of an isometric view to start out. And then from here you just go up to File and Save As, and save a copy as the template. And we'll call this AU 2017. And we'll save it.

And now our template's there. Now, if you wanted to enter in your parameters ahead of time, you could do that too. Up at the top you have the FX button. That's your parameters and you could come in and add user parameters here and just start entering in what parameters you wanted and get them set up and ready to go. So you could do that and save that to a template as well.

Now if I was to click File, New, now I can see my AU 2017 template right there and it's ready to go. And that just saves to the Inventor template folder. You can push that out to other users if you wanted to.

All right. I'm going to go ahead and start with this. Let's just set up this file. I'm going to save it, and we'll call this file AU 2017. This will be my file for our model, and we'll go ahead and get modeling. So like I said, the first thing we want to do is start with a sketch. So we're going to select to start a sketch, and now we want to choose what plane we want to work with with this sketch.

So you can hover over the planes and they'll highlight. And once you select, that sketch will be attached to it. Now, if the planes are not visible here in your model you can also select them out of your model browser, which is nice. So I'm going to use the XY plane. We're going to model the top of the structure looking downward and extrude from there.

Next, what we'll do is you see some basic AutoCAD commands on how things you can use for modeling. They worked similar, but again, Inventor's a little bit different than AutoCAD. You don't have to say Snap to something. It automatically knows to snap because it is a model. It wants things to be constrained all the time. So it's going to try to snap.

The commands work a little bit different, but it's pretty intuitive. It's not too bad. With a few basic Inventor training videos you can get in and get rolling pretty quick. So we'll use the rectangle and two point center, and then I'm going to snap to my center point here, and I'll start just dragging out. And now if I clicked and dropped it would use the sizes on the screen and then I'd have to come back and add some dimensions to constrain this, but I want to constrain it as I'm working. So I'll just start and begin typing.

I'm going to use just SP length and SP width. I found that to work just fine. In the parameters table in the sheet I do mention using US, underground structure length and width to define it. But I was able to get it to work out fine just using SP length and width because that's the connection point.

So I'm going to use SP length, and equals 78. And then I'm just going to tab, and I'll use SP width equals 48, and Enter. And then double click your middle button. That'll zoom Extents. Now one thing, when you look at objects in Inventor, immediately you can see these lines are blue. That's good. That means they're constrained.

So they're already tied together and whatnot. If they're green they're not constrained and you need to provide some constraints for them.

AUDIENCE: So if I [INAUDIBLE], does that automatically [INAUDIBLE]?

STEVE HILL: Yes. So when you type them out, if I go to the FX, you see them, they're tied to the model. So they start adding them in. What's that?

AUDIENCE: Repeat the question.

STEVE HILL: Oh, I'm sorry. He asked when you type them out in here if they do show up in your parameters, and they do. I apologize for that.

All right. So next, we'll go ahead and do the offset, so an offset to the interior. I don't know if there's a better way, interior or exterior. For this part, I did interior. So you can choose how you want to do that. I mean, I'm just going to use the offset command, I'll select this outer rectangle, bring it in.

You can see they're green, meaning they're not constrained. So I'll start typing in my parameter. I'll use wall th equals 4. And this model is set up in inches, so I'm modeling everything with inches here. And we'll hit the Enter key, and now we've got our modeled wall, or just a sketch of it.

One thing I'll say that is helpful as you're doing these models is to pull off your dimensions so that they can be read later, because when you finalize this part you'll need to have that ready. And you'll see what I'm talking about in a bit. It creates that image that we saw in IPE that defines what these values are, and these dimensions are used for that.

So it's good to just pull them off. And I'm just grabbing onto it with no command running and dragging it where I want to put it. We'll finish the sketch, and next we can start and create an extrusion. So on our 3D model tab we'll use extrude, and then it's asking for the shape, the profile here.

So we can hover, and I don't know if you can see it out there, but it highlights slightly. Can everybody see that highlight change? OK. So I'm going to highlight over the wall and then you can see it starting to go upwards. So in my distance here I'm going to use US height for underground structure height equals 60, and it's starting to extrude.

Now, I'm going to call this XY plane the top of my structure. So I want it to extrude the other direction. So underneath your distance here you can choose what direction you want to go. So I can say direction one, direction two to go downward, or I can select if you need to we'll use this later, but doing a symmetric. So it's going to split that all on that plane.

So I'm going go downward and then select OK. And there's our first extrusion and we're ready. Now, notice over here in your model browser that you do have the extrusion and then if you expand it you see the sketch. So the sketch is consumed by that extrusion, and so you can kind of tell the order of things from here.

It's nice to be able to come back and rename these. So when you get back into these models if you need to it makes it a little bit more easier to figure out what you're modeling. So I'll call this wall extrusion. Next, I'm going to come over to my zoom toolbar here and click the orbit, and I'll rotate around to the bottom of the structure.

And I want to create a plane on the bottom of this. So I mentioned creating planes is an important part, so we'll come up to the 3D Model tab and the plane button and we'll say offset from plane. We'll choose the bottom of the part here and we'll offset zero just to be right at the bottom. And I'm going to rename that plane bottom of structure.

All right. So the next thing we want to do is create another sketch, and we'll select the bottom of structure plane. And now to be able to use this line work we can use this project geometry button that will project geometry from our model onto that plane, and then you can do further things to that geometry. So we'll use project geometry. I'm going to select the wall here, right click and say OK.

Now that geometry is on my sketch. That's all I need to do. I'm going to finish the sketch and I'm going to do an extruded and we're going to extrude the floor now. So we'll select the profile and select the wall and then we want to make sure we select the interior portion as well because that's part of the floor to create a full solid. And I'm going to call this, I got to remember what I called this, that goes to the floor-- yeah, this is called floor thickness.

This one isn't a critical value that I know of. So floor we'll just make that 7 inches. So now we have our structure. If we look down in it we can see the floor there. I'm going to turn off this bottom of structure plane by right clicking and selecting visibility so that I can see my floor there.

So the next thing we need to do is model our interior walls of the structure. So we'll start a 2D sketch, we'll select our plane down the middle, and I'm going to rotate this view a bit. All right. So this isn't really helpful in a sketch because I want to sketch down the middle of this thing.

I can't see through the object. So in order to cut this object in half so that we can see our walls and what the structure looks like down the middle, we can go to the View tab and turn on our slice graphics. And it's going to slice on this plane that we currently have selected.

Then we'll come back to our sketch. And here we're just going to use a rectangle two point a few times to model our walls. So we've got a wall here, we've got a wall-- now, if you watch what you're constraining to it's going to try to constrain to points. So if I want the tops of these walls to match, I want to line this up, and that will remember that constraint for us so I don't have to enter as many parameters. And then I'm going to throw another wall in here and I want this weer ball to be constrained to the floor.

All right. So next, I want to be able to position these walls. I get green lines because I have to add constraints still. What are the my dimensions for these walls and where they're going to be placed? Next, what I want to do is be able to control these walls from a center of them so that I can-- all my dimensions will be based off the center because wall thickness variable could change. So let's model them off the center so we can position these where we want them. So to do that, I'm going to come up to our format and there's a construction line option here. We'll hit construction line. So construction lines ignores them when you try to do extrusions and things like that. They're just for constraining things.

So I'm going to use construction and I'm just going to select a line. I'm going to go from the midpoint to the perpendicular on that wall, we'll go from midpoint to perpendicular on this wall, midpoint to perpendicular on that wall. Now we're ready to start constraining.

So these constraints don't really matter as much for the parameters table because these aren't the ones that are going to link anything up, but these can be pushed out in your model to control where the walls are. So if you wanted to have a bunch of different sizes of where these walls are you could do so. So we'll say dimension here.

And I'm just going to select the tops of these walls first because I want these to be the same wall thickness as my wall. So I'll go ahead and drag this and then instead of typing in a dimension or a variable here I want this just to use the same wall thickness option. So you could add a different one, but for this example, I just want to show you could reference existing parameters that are in your model.

So we'll hit this arrow button, and then we can say list parameters and you can select any that are already defined. Some I'm going to use wall thickness, hit the check box. So now that should be constrained. We'll go ahead and do the same thing here. This one's should be a little more drastic to see the difference so that it gets constrained.

All right. So next what we want to do is constrain the heights of these walls. So I'm going to select the top of this wall and the top of my structure, and I'm going to pull off a dimension and I'm going to call this baffle top offset equals 12 inches. And notice both of those adjusted because they were constrained. They were drawn that way.

And then we'll use a dimension on the bottom and we'll go ahead and do the same thing here I'm going to select the bottom and the bottom of the structure and I'm going to call this baffle bottom offset equals 12. And then we want to pull off a dimension here on this weir. We'll call this weir height equals 24.

And all that's left now is the position of these walls and where they're going to be constrained to. So we're going to use a dimension you could go from the center point. It all depends on how you want to offset this. I'm just going to offset from the inside edge of the wall to the center line and drag up. And I'm just going to call this baffle offset end.

I mean, you could call these whatever you want at this point, and we'll say that this is 16 inches. So you can see that gets adjusted that way. I want this one to be the same from this end and we'll tie that together. Wrong parameter. Baffle offset end and that one gets adjusted and then we want to control from the end wall to the center of the weir, pull off, and we'll call this weir offset and equals 24.

So that's that sketch and we'll go ahead and Finish. And then the next thing I like to do to get these extrude is just kind of tip our views so we can select those objects, or that part of the sketch, and we'll say extrude, select our profile. So I'm going to select those three objects. And then I want this to be symmetric on this plane, so I'm going to hit the symmetric button. And then here I just want to enter in a formula to have this calculate what the width is of the interior of the structure.

So I'm going to use less parameters I want the SP width minus and put a parenthese, and we'll say two times the wall thickness and hit Enter. And now those are exactly right to that wall. So now we have our model. I'm going to turn off our planes here.

All right. Cool. So next we can go up to the FX parameters and take a look at how this thing models. And I'd recommend just playing around with it. So if you change any of these sizes, like for instance, the weir offset, if we change this to 36 that weir wall moves. So these are just the default ones I put in there if I change the width of this from 78 to say 58. So that gets adjusted.

So everything's working. It looks good. Next thing while we're in this parameters, what you want to do here is choose which parameters are going to be exposed out of the model to view into IPE. So I'm going to go through-- and the key column is really your primary column that you need to select. Selecting both key and export is fine, but the key column is really the one that IPE reads.

So you need to go through and just check these boxes to define which parameters get exposed. So if you don't want somebody to be able to control the walls on this model you can not check those and there will always be positioned at the same point, or you could provide those options. All right. So there's those. We'll say done.

Next, we're going to go up and define our structure material here. So I'm going to switch our poll down from our material to Autodesk Material Library. I prefer that one. And I'm going to come up to concrete cast in place, so we get a nice concrete material on this. And we'll right click and say OK.