Description
Key Learnings
- Explore InfoDrainage software's features for streamlined drainage design and stormwater management.
- Learn how to integrate InfoDrainage into existing workflows for enhanced collaboration and efficiency.
- Learn how to optimize stormwater designs with design logic switching and clash detection.
Speakers
- DGDavid GarriguesDavid is the Head of Engineering Applications and has been with Kimley-Horn for over 17 years. He has is a change agent and relationship builder with a passion for anything that involves engineering. David has been a popular speaker at Autodesk University for many years and has been featured in both CADalyst and AWWA. As a presenter, David's energetic nature and enthusiasm makes him easily relatable.
- Tim YarrisTim has been with Autodesk since 2006 and spent several years designing the user experience and producing in-product learning materials for Civil 3D and InfraWorks. In Tim’s current role as Civil 3D product manager, he works closely with customers and the development team to define the future of Civil 3D.
- MPMike PizzinoMike has been with Autodesk since 2022. Prior to Autodesk Mike worked as a land development engineer specializing in stormwater design for a multitude of private and publicly funded land development projects across various sectors. Mike's current role as Drainage Modeling Technical Support Engineer has him working closely with customers, sales, customer success and product development to support customers with current needs but also to drive InfoDrainage adoption across the US.
DAVID GARRIGUES: Hi, my name is David Garrigues, and I'm the Head of Engineering Applications team here at Kimley-Horn. And we're going to talk today about how we get stuff done with InfoDrainage and Civil 3D. But first, let's get started with a few introductions. Carolyn?
CAROLYN ROSE: Hi, everybody. I'm Carolyn Rose. I lead the Global Autodesk Water Infrastructure Customer Success team. I have about 20 years of experience in water, wastewater, reclaimed water modeling.
TIM YARRIS: Hi, everyone. My name is Tim Yarris. I am a Senior Product Manager here at Autodesk. I've been here for about 18 years. I'm responsible for Civil 3D as an overall product, as well as I have a very tight concentration on the land development industry.
MIKE PIZZINO: Hello. My name is Mike Pizzino. I'm a Drainage Modeling Technical Support Engineer-- it's a mouthful-- primarily supporting InfoDrainage and XPSWMM with Autodesk. Prior to Autodesk, I put 12-plus years in land development engineering, primarily working with Civil 3D projects and as a stormwater specialist using just about every product on the market for stormwater design. David?
DAVID GARRIGUES: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. Like I said, I'm with Kimley-Horn, and I've been here over 17 years. I'm chiefly responsible for all of our engineering software. So regardless if it's deployment, programming, training, all of that, that falls underneath my responsibility.
But what I'm most proud of is the ability and the opportunity to be able to turn a software vendor into a software partner. And we're going to see that today by the great panel that we have today with us.
Partnerships require work. It requires real work, work towards a common goal. Now, Tim and I, we've known each other for a very, very long time, and he is considered a friend to the firm and a true partner.
Carolyn and I met about two years ago when we signed a new agreement. And it was we were just going to go on an adventure together. And she's the real deal. And new teams were created underneath her and with her to help us understand what could we go do together.
But when we go do that, you have to understand that we have over 130 offices and around 9,000 people. And you can just imagine all this jurisdictions that we've got to go do and work with. They all have separate needs.
And so how do we do that? How do we get one piece of software to work with one other piece of software? How do we get InfoDrainage to really work with Civil 3D? How do we go do that? And I realized that it can't just work for Kimley-Horn. It's got to work for you all, too.
In fact, what we could say is that a lot of you, we may be working on projects right now together. In other words, we're partners right now on projects. And at the same time, there's a lot of you that we may be in competition on a project together going on right now.
And so the point is that we all need to work together. And that's what this is about, working together as partners. Two examples of that, you're going to see this week with Kimley-Horn, one, myself in Esri and Nearmap. We're all going to be working together on a project where I have a class that you guys can look us up on. And we're going to be learning about that and what can we do with Nearmap imagery and AI with Esri, what can we do.
In fact, we're doing another class with Tim because we're partnered up with him on some corridor things. You should look up Tim Yarris and some other projects that we're working on with him. So it'd be a great class to go see on that too, as well.
But today we're going to talk about certain things. And before we do, Tim has some things to say. Tim?
TIM YARRIS: This is my favorite slide. So a lot of the things that I'm going to be covering in my portion of this presentation are things that are not necessarily in the products just yet. So as far as some of these future-facing technologies are concerned, I just want to-- just keep this in mind, please, as I cover these things that our plans can and do change.
So what I'm going to be showing you is not a guarantee of things ending up in the product. So please don't make purchasing decisions based on what I'm going to cover. And so now that we've covered that, I think, Carolyn, what else have we got?
DAVID GARRIGUES: So-- so-- so that was-- that was a great slide, Tim [YAWNS] Anyway,
TIM YARRIS: Thanks. Love it.
DAVID GARRIGUES: Great, great slide. Great slide, Tim Exactly what I want to hear about. Let me ask you a question for everybody out here in the world here. How many of us have to go off and go use spreadsheets to get a printed result of our analysis or our reporting that we're going to go send to our client? You or somebody you know is doing that. We all agree on that.
So that's one of the biggest things that we're going to share today. Super excited about it. And they call it Flexible Reporting. You're going to see several examples of that today. But just know that you can finally configure your look, your feel, your jurisdiction, however they want it to look, you can do that.
And it becomes minutes now instead of spending hours trying to move and mitigate all this stuff. You don't have to do that anymore. So that's going to be a big deal. And Mike's going to go all into that. So be ready for that. It's going to be a big deal.
What if we started looking at this is where Tim's safe harbor statement comes into play? As we talk about what if there's a new pond object? So stick around. There's good stuff here, y'all. What if there was a new channel object? What if we had a new underground storage object? What if we made upgrades to our catchments so that way they could better participate in that total workflow that we're looking for?
What if there was really a better integration between InfoDrainage and Civil 3D? That's what's we're going to talk about today. Because at the end of the day, what we're here to talk about is when it rains. What happens when it rains? Can we predict that? Can we understand that? Can we control that? And with that said, I'll turn it over to Carolyn.
CAROLYN ROSE: Thanks, David. Before we get into all the exciting technical features that have been added to the products, I want to talk a little bit about the partnership that was built in the last two years. Autodesk Water, formerly Innovyze, was acquired by Autodesk about three years ago. And this type of partnership was new to Innovyze and Kimley-Horn.
Dave and I spent a lot of time working through what the key objectives were for Kimley, talking to as many Kimley-Horn engineers, and learning their key pain points, areas of improvement, and even where competitor products may have fit their workflows better.
Water can be many things-- hydraulic and hydrological system planning, drainage design, water quality and treatment, asset management, and the list goes on. Kimley-Horn largely invests in land development and have mastered their design processes. They have invested in tools, built enhancements to these tools, but we're ready to explore and think outside of the box. And how could they improve their workflows and focus on areas where they could reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ensure compliance?
Autodesk Water has a solution called InfoDrainage that is new to the US market. InfoDrainage is a full design and analysis tool that enables drainage design engineers to analyze the flows and mitigate flooding through pipes and sustainable infrastructure, with a fully integrated Civil 3D process all the way to compliance.
So David and I got to work and asked ourselves, how could InfoDrainage improve their projects? We put together a team from Kimley-Horn and Autodesk, and we started by having Kimley-Horn walk us through their current drainage processes. We then decided to mimic those workflows using one of their completed projects to understand how InfoDrainage compared through each step and also validate results between the platforms.
We learned that InfoDrainage was able to complete these processes, but we could dream bigger. Kimley-Horn said our most time-consuming processes is creating spreadsheets for each jurisdictional approval requirements. And thus, Flexible Reporting was born in InfoDrainage.
We didn't stop there. We made improvements to help optimize stormwater systems with design wizard, glass detection, and interoperability with Civil 3D. We have a lot of exciting new enhancements, like David said, that have come out of this partnership. And I'd like to pass it to Tim Yarris to talk about the Civil 3D enhancements.
TIM YARRIS: Awesome. Thank you very much, Carolyn. So as David mentioned, he and I have a long history of working together as partners to make Civil 3D better for not just Kimley-Horn but the entire industry.
David's a long-time Civil 3D enthusiast. Is enthusiast the right word to say here for you?
DAVID GARRIGUES: I would absolutely say so. Let's go Civil 3D. Let's go.
TIM YARRIS: I thought so-- enthusiast. So he's made sure that Kimley-Horn has had a voice in Civil 3D development over the years, which has been an outstanding thing. So the story we're sharing today is a great example of that partnership that we've had. And when Kimley Horn started putting InfoDrainage through its paces, we saw an opportunity to solidify the partnership between Civil 3D and InfoDrainage, just like we've done between Kimley-Horn and Autodesk.
So when this story started, it became clear that Kimley-Horn liked InfoDrainage, but we wanted them to love it. So we asked them and other customers how we might make it easier to build it into their project workflows.
So this video is showing analysis results being imported from InfoDrainage into the Civil 3D design environment. The InfoDrainage team did a ton of great work to add many more analysis results data to the Civil 3D model after the analysis was complete.
Mike's going to show you-- he's going to do a deep dive on this, but at a high level, things that they added to the ability to bring analysis data back into Civil 3D included values for properties such as the maximum flow, return period, maximum velocity, and so on. And overall, this makes it way easier for users to connect the drainage design and analysis workflows in a much more agile, responsive, and intelligent manner. So if you'd click, please. Awesome.
On the Civil 3D side, we updated the catchment object to add support for the SCS runoff method, which was a long-standing customer request. We also modernized the user interface, which sets us up to make a lot more improvements to catchments in the near future.
And while connecting Civil 3D and InfoDrainage was a huge leap forward, that wasn't enough. You all know that running an analysis isn't the end of the road. You have to build a report that will satisfy the requirements of the local jurisdiction. Kimley-Horn works on projects in many locales, right, David?
DAVID GARRIGUES: That is correct. That is correct. Many, many, many, many.
TIM YARRIS: Many. Many, many.
DAVID GARRIGUES: You got to think about what it really means to everybody because all those people that aren't in our cities, they're in other cities, and they have the same kinds of problems. So this is a big deal for everyone.
TIM YARRIS: Absolutely, yeah. So you and the entire industry really needs a really flexible way to build reports to satisfy all those different locales. And while this video is a super brief introduction to it, Mike's going to show you how this works. But just know that the Flexible Reporting workflow in InfoDrainage enables you to expose all the available inputs, outputs, simulation results, calculated values, and all those good things, all in one simple-to-use table.
Customers have told us, and David mentioned this, that when you finish the design process, it was taking you up to an hour or more to pull a report. Excuse me. It took you an hour or more to pull the results into a spreadsheet. But again, with Flexible Reporting, that's no longer the case.
So the workflow between drainage design and analysis is better today, but we're not stopping. We're actively working on making the Civil 3D and InfoDrainage experience even better than what Mike is going to show you. This is where that safe harbor statement that I mentioned, comes into play. So the next couple of minutes are all about what's under development for the future.
So what this means-- here's our vision. Design is going to take place in a single product. That's Civil 3D. This is going to mean that Civil 3D is going to need a complete suite of drainage design tools for not just pipes and structures, but for ponds, channels, and other drainage elements that Civil 3D does not support today.
Design data is going to be stored in the cloud so other personas will have access to that same data no matter the workflow. Drainage analysis and simulation will be launched from within the Civil 3D environment. And the analysis of simulation is going to take place in the cloud, with the results seamlessly reflected in both the shared project data on the cloud and in the design environment on the desktop. Non-design personas will be able to use the same UI to run simulations and reports directly from the project without needing a desktop product at all.
And then access to these services aren't going to be limited to just Civil 3D. Other access points could include InfoDrainage for the drainage engineer persona who really wants to keep working in that familiar environment of InfoDrainage, or even Autodesk Forma in the future.
So the Civil 3D team has been hard at work on this workflow, and here's an example of where we are today. This video is showing the new catchment dialogue that I mentioned earlier. And it's also showing that we're laying out a pond object using purpose-built pond design tools.
It's a real simple 3D object. So the creation workflow should look very familiar. We're giving it a name, depth, starting inside slopes, starting elevation, and freeboard. We're laying out vertices to get the initial outline of the pond. And once the initial layout is complete--
DAVID GARRIGUES: Hey, Tim?
TIM YARRIS: --you have flexibility to edit the pond, to do things like modify the elevation, add storage stages, and adjust the inside slope.
DAVID GARRIGUES: Hey, Tim?
TIM YARRIS: Yes, sir?
DAVID GARRIGUES: The thing is that your pond is very pointy. You have a very pointy pond. And I don't know if you've been outside lately, but just saying.
TIM YARRIS: I get that. OK, OK. Point taken. So hold that thought. You know how complicated ponds can be. So imagine how complicated it is to build a tool that's going to help you design that pond. Think about that, David. So I'm going to show you a little bit more of that in a little bit.
So a lot of different things you can do to refine the pond here, but yeah I knew you were going to give me grief about that one. So when we started doing this workflow, David and plenty of other customers told us how quickly that ponds do have curves. My personal mission in life is to make customers happy, even David.
DAVID GARRIGUES: That's awesome. We thank you for that. Tim. On behalf of everybody here watching this, we do thank you for that. We appreciate you, Tim.
TIM YARRIS: You're very welcome. So the team's been hard at work to add editing options that will help you design curvy, natural ponds. And we're starting with adding curves in the editing workflow because customers like you have told us that they spend about 10% of their time creating objects and about 90% of their time editing them. Is that true, David?
DAVID GARRIGUES: That is a very true statement, and I think I want to reiterate that. What he's saying is that I think we all discover laying out things is very quick. Most of the time, that's a very quick thing for us to go do. But we spend most of our time editing those once we've created it. We're trying to change something about it, adapt or whatever we're trying to go do. But the shape is generally trying to stay the same. But editing rather than creating. Editing is where the money's at. And so that's what the segment is all about. Yes, thank you, Tim, for listening.
TIM YARRIS: We are listening. Absolutely. And the video that we just saw a moment ago, some of the things that we didn't cover in that were things like the overall analysis workflow. So once the pond object's been created and you've connected your pipes to it, the pipes stay glued to the pond so that if you move the pond to a different location or edit any of the properties of the pond, the pipes all stay glued to it. So it's that same dynamic nature with that object as you get in other dynamic objects throughout Civil 3D.
And then when you kick of the analysis just from within Civil 3D, you can do things like just specifying your rainfall events and that sort of thing. And it takes it up to the cloud, runs the analysis. And when the analysis results come back, it gives you the opportunity to validate the data that comes back, make sure that none of your objects have any kind of violations that didn't let the analysis complete.
And then it also lets you populate all that analysis data from the analysis back on to the objects so you can do things like plot the HGL and EGL lines on your profile, add all that data onto the elements within Civil 3D. So really tight workflow.
So then if you go to the next slide here, please. Again, while we appreciate Kimley-Horn's feedback on this workflow, they're not the only customer. We want everybody's feedback on this new workflow. So as of this week at Autodesk University, a beta of the drainage analysis workflow is available on the Autodesk Infrastructure Futures portal. If you join this program using this QR code, you'll be able to download the beta, test it out, and provide feedback directly to the development team.
And then to find out what else we're working on with drainage analysis, or really anything else on our civil infrastructure product line, check out our civil infrastructure public roadmap using the QR code on this screen. This is going to give you a high-level idea of what it is that we are actively working on.
And then it'll also give you insights on the next slide here about what else is on our radar for the future. For everything up here, you can vote on it and add your comments, which is all going to help us provide just context and help us prioritize what else it is that we're working on next as far as adding our development resources behind.
DAVID GARRIGUES: I cannot stress enough for everyone to engage with this over here, so definitely hit on that QR code. Tim's absolutely right. This is a whole entire partnership. This is all of us. All of us together are trying to make a better product for us, for our clients, for our output. Let's go do the right thing, and let's all join together and join up on this over here and get our votes casted. And let's put forth the right effort to the right item that we need to go. So, yes, please do.
TIM YARRIS: Please, please do. Yeah, we absolutely take all the feedback that we get very, very seriously. So that's all in the near future. But at this point, Mike is going to spend some time showing you what you can do with Civil 3D and InfoDrainage together today. So, Mike, take it away.
MIKE PIZZINO: Awesome. Thank you, Tim. So many exciting things for Civil 3D in the near and far future. But we also have some exciting things for InfoDrainage as well. So I'll start off with a short quote, "Water is the driving force of all nature." And we all know this to be true, especially the land development engineers and stormwater design engineers that we'll go into a little bit here.
So Autodesk has identified and spoken with a lot of customers to identify the challenges of their current workflows. So that workflow is going to look something similar to where you start out in Civil 3D and then you use some sort of custom-built export feature or manually typing in values into Excel.
And it's just it's a terribly inefficient, inefficient workflow. There's no integration between the softwares, and you end up with data that is all over the place. And that's the worst nightmare from a design standpoint. You don't know what's the most current. So you're like, well, is this the right thing? If somebody else jumps in the project, it just ends up increasing your risk for errors. And ultimately, the bottom line is this is all time-consuming and expensive as well.
So where does InfoDrainage come into the mix? So the graphic there, a lot of times we have those projects where we're just all over the place. For some reason, the project started to go sideways. And InfoDrainage's goal is from that hydraulic design process to keep that as simple as possible, keep it in as few design packages as possible. That way we reduce all those risks for errors.
And to do that, we have the direct interoperability with Civil 3D. There's an import/export feature in Civil 3D. In InfoDrainage, there's a network design wizard that you give it a set of constraints, and it designs out your pipe network or your channel network, eliminating the need for manually editing values in Excel or anything like that.
Network clash detection tool-- so that is a tool where you can bring in a sanitary network, for example, into the InfoDrainage model and run clash detection on it. And that will help you identify any areas that need attention before that data is back into Civil 3D. So you don't have to identify those clashes in Civil 3D in your profiles. You've already brought it over from Excel or something else. And then you identify that clash, and then you have to go back to the design package to change things and then re-bring it in. It's just a terrible waste of time.
Design auditing tool-- so that allows those QC managers and PMs out there to identify a set of standards for that particular project and that model. And then you can run that pool against the design features in that model and, it'll spit out a result, something to the effect that your pipe sizes don't match this jurisdiction requirement or your cover depth is too shallow based on this jurisdiction.
Lastly, as has been mentioned before, we're going to drive this home, Flexible Reporting. So that allows the engineers to take all of our inputs and our results in InfoDrainage, regardless of if it's just that network design wizard rational on our pipes, or it's the SWMM results from our pond sizing or our underground detention sizing. That's all been mashed together into one tool that we can report out anything that we want in the InfoDrainage model.
So what does this all really look like? How do we get to all this? So the interoperability with Civil 3D there. Once you install InfoDrainage on your machine that already has Civil 3D on it, it will install an Innovyze tab directly in Civil 3D. And within that tab, we have import/exporting tools. We also have the part mapping manager. So that will help us save a lot of time if we take the initial effort to go through and map all of our Civil 3D parts to what sizes and shapes we want them to be in InfoDrainage.
And then when you go through that process, you import that template, and bam! Everything's already been mapped. Once you do that, you don't have to go through and do any manual mapping. So let's take a look at what that whole process really, really looks like.
So in the example here, we have a relatively simple pipe network. We've got a couple main lines and a handful of-- excuse me-- branch lines and inlets on the model. In the tool space we can see that we have that storm network. We also have that final and existing grade.
But within our storm network in those network properties, we need to tell that network to use that FG surface. That's going to be important when we send all the data to InfoDrainage. It'll bring in that surface into InfoDrainage.
And then additionally, as Tim has mentioned, we're going to look at the catchments in action here. So we can create those catchments, whether it be from the surface or from polylines. We can just convert those directly to those catchment objects.
We need to give it a set of properties that InfoDrainage understands. So we have a couple of different runoff methods. We need to set our runoff coefficients, our time of concentration. We also need to go through and set a destination structure for that pipe network so InfoDrainage understands that this catchment needs to drain to this particular structure. And it'll understand all of that when we go through and do that export process.
So once everything gets set up, we can do a check on our structure properties to check that yes, that catchment data is attached to this structure. It's got the POC. It's got the weighted runoff coefficient. So that data will make its way into-- we'll be confident that that data is going to get into Civil 3D.
So this process is-- we'll stop the video for a second. So we can go through and build out our entire labeling structure. We can go through and build out all of our profiles and whatever we want. Because when we bring that final design back into Civil 3D, it's going to update that pipe network. We don't have to do any rework on new pipe networks or anything like that. It's just going to update that current network. So all your labels, all the styles and everything, it will simply update those once that new data comes in.
DAVID GARRIGUES: Hey, Mike?
MIKE PIZZINO: Yeah?
DAVID GARRIGUES: Hey, that's kind of a big deal because I know that certain software packages, sometimes they duplicate structures that I've got, and I've got a whole lot of cleanup. And it doesn't-- it loses it in translation and stuff like that. And you're going to talk later on about that file and why the significance of that file is important today.
Later on, we might not need the file later on. And we're going to hit up on Tim on that one. Don't worry. We'll beat up Tim later. But that is the importance of this one and what's different is that all of that problems kind go away using this.
MIKE PIZZINO: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So there are some-- we call them standard workflows, the workflows that are the most efficient with Civil 3D and InfoDrainage there. We'll go through a couple of those.
But from this standpoint, we need to get that data to Civil 3D. So we use that Export button. Through this process, it's going to create a new InfoDrainage file. It's going to create that new model file.
And then from here we have to tell it we want that storm network. And this is important where that final grade surface comes in. Because if we don't attach that to the network, it's not going to show up in the export tool. So we need to attach that to the network.
And then from here, the mapping manager. So there is a manual component to this if we don't have that mapping already set up. But we can go through-- if you taken a little bit of effort to go through and create those mappings for all of your parts, then you can simply navigate to that mapping file, hit OK. It'll import it.
Now, it looks a little concerning here because we have every single mapping that we've created for all of our parts. Now, the only thing that's going to get transferred to InfoDrainage are those components that are actually in the model. So it's not a huge concern that it's brought in everything.
And the same thing with the junctions. We can do the same mapping. I didn't go through it here, but you can do the same exact thing with your Civil 3D parts to map those directly to InfoDrainage.
And then once we do that, it'll take a minute or two to go through, and it'll read all those parts. And it'll give you a warning-- or not a warning, a message in your command line history that it's exported successfully.
So what does it look like when we get it into InfoDrainage? So we can see there's the surface that we told it to export. There are the catchments. Those are tied directly to the structures that we told it to in Civil 3D, and all of our structures and our pipes.
And if we jump into one of those catchments, it will show all that data that we preset in Civil 3D. And that data was transferred over, so we don't have to do any manual manipulation in InfoDrainage once that data comes over. It makes life much easier when you do it all in one spot and you're not having to move between products.
So the next step in the process, we've got to take a little bit of time to-- we need to size out all of our pipes. We need to add our ponds and our stormwater controls but focusing in more a little bit on the pipes and channels.
So network design wizard allows us to provide a set of constraints to the wizard, and it will go through and size all of our pipes and channels based on those constraints. And the two primary constraints are minimizing the excavation where it keeps the pipe as shallow as possible. But then also we can tell it to minimize the pipe size where it sends that pipe a little bit deeper to reduce that pipe diameter.
We use a couple different methods if we want, rational and modified rational. And it will also calculate any connected branch lines. So if we have those flow paths connected to that main trunk line, it will calculate out those branch lines as well.
Conversely, if there are components of that network that aren't tied to the main line that we select through the wizard, then we would have to size those separately. So this will go through that a little bit. So we have to have rainfall data to be able to run that network design wizard. So we can use a table IDF, or if we want to bring in the NOAA data, it'll bring in the rainfall intensities for us to use.
We take a first glance at the profile that we have set up here. It'll look a little bit different after we get through the network design wizard. But this is the first pass. This is directly what came in directly from Civil 3D.
And then when we get into network design wizard, there are a couple of different things that we can do. So we can do all those criteria ahead of time and then run the wizard. Or we can run the wizard and set the criteria as we go through the wizard. So I'm doing the former here, where I'm going through and set the rainfall data.
And then the constraints here are going to be all the constraints that the wizard uses when it goes through and sizes the pipes. So like many other things in InfoDrainage, we can set a pipe library. We can save a pipe size library and then bring it in whenever we need for a particular project. If a jurisdiction has certain size pipes, we'll tell it we want a max 36-inch diameter pipe.
And then moving into the design logic. Like I mentioned before, that minimized excavation, minimized pipe diameter, that's an either-- it's an or statement there, so we can pick one or the other. We can also tell it to use level crowns or level inverts. We have that option. We can set a minimum cover depth.
We can set minimum and maximum slopes if we want. If you so choose-- I don't see a lot of people using it-- but the manhole sizing, we can size out different manholes. We would set a library set of sizes for that as well.
We can allow backdrops, the backdrop within the structure from in and out. We cab check velocity. We can do a minimum/maximum velocity. And then I had checked it off for this particular case because I want it to size all the branch lines connected to it. But if we wanted to exclude those branch line calculations for one reason or another, we can choose to do that.
So then when we get back into the wizard, we select the flow path that we want. And I'm going to select my main trunk line. And it'll give us a preview of all the design as it currently stands. So that's all the inverts, all the values associated with every single one of those pipes as it currently stands. This is where the flow criteria that we already created. So that's just the next, and the same thing with the design options.
And then this summary here. So every box in yellow is a value that the wizard is going to change based on the constraints that we gave it. So it's going to set all of our inverse diameters and so on and so forth. And then additionally, if there are some constraints that it couldn't work within, it's going to flag those. And it'll tell you that you need to take a look at them just to make sure that that's really what you want.
The one thing to note about the network design wizard is it gets you almost-- it'll get you 90%, 95% of the way there on your pipe sizing. It still needs a little bit of engineering work for the engineers to justify their existence to be able to go in and double-check, just to make sure everything looks like it should.
And then when you hit the Finish button, it's going to give the report. So those are all the final values, flows, and depths for the new pipe sizes. And then, like I mentioned before, the profile shows a different profile with different sizes and stuff that it thinks that it meets that set of criteria.
Clash detection-- so clash detection is a great feature in that we can identify locations of clashing before we're finished with the final design. So we've all been in scenarios where we've brought in our sanitary profile and crossing into our storm profile and something ends up clashing. And well, we got to go back and change one or the other. So which one are we going to change? And which one's the least headache? Or which one's the less costly? So we can avoid that ahead of time with the clash detection analysis.
So it's going to look at pipe to pipe. It's going to look at pipe to structure. And it's going to look at either of those compared to-- excuse me-- the stormwater controls, like your ponds, underground detention, and so on.
We're going to specify a horizontal and vertical separation. And it's just going to go through and do some calculations as to where these individual components are. And it will flag them if they violate what we have set.
So I brought in a sanitary network in this model. So I'm going to turn that on. And we can see in the phase management, we've got both of those networks active in the model. And in the Analysis tab, jump to the analysis tool. And then we set these phases that we want to look at. So in this case, I'm going to compare storm and sanitary. But it will also go through and compare storm to storm and sanitary to sanitary.
As an example, if you have for some reason there's a branch that passes by one of your structures in the same storm network, and it'll flag that for you. So we need to add in the separation requirements that we want and then just hit Go. And it'll take a second, and it'll pop up with the results. And it'll identify what we have that's conflicting.
And we hit that Go To button, and it'll jump directly to that location. And we look at which items are clashing, and then we can make that adjustment as needed. And we can see in the results we've got the different phases, storm versus sanitary, but also the different items. So it's going to point those out by name so you can go in and directly modify those where needed. And it'll also tell you the separation distances that it's identified. So you know, OK, I need to lower this pipe by 5 inches to avoid the clash.
Design auditing-- so this one's for those QC engineers, those EORs. We would do this before-- we can do it before that design its makes its way back into Civil 3D because if there are changes that we need to make, it would make sense to do it ahead of time. But we can also do that again. We can audit it and then send it back to Civil 3D to update the pipe network again, if we needed to.
So there are a number of different items that we can tell it to audit. Covered up pipe diameter and discharge rate are a couple that I'll go through. And then like everything else in InfoDrainage, we can save those settings so we can use them again later at a different project. If you set it up for one particular jurisdiction, then it's going to have all that same data.
So just like the previous phases, we've got to set our results because we're going to look at those discharge rates. So we need to make sure we have current set of results so it is looking at the right set of data.
In the Results tab, we open up that audit report. And we have the option to check on and off any of the options that we see there. And then once we get that to a point where we want it, we can save it.
Or if we want to import something that was pre-saved from a pipeline standpoint, we can set any particular range of values that we want to look at. So if we want to just a minimum or a minimum or maximum, we can set that. Same thing with cover depth. We have those range options.
And then discharge rate-- I particularly like this one because there's scenarios where we can end up with a discharge rate that doesn't meet the requirements. So this will go through and add our required discharge rates. And then it will take a look at the model and to identify if that post-development discharge rate is appropriate or not. And it'll flag it for us in end report.
So from a pipe diameter standpoint, if we have the minimum up there but then also the design engineer chose to use 12-inch pipes for all those that are shown, so now we know that we need to go back in and change every single one of those pipes to 15.
Same goes with cover depth. It identifies what pipes violate that and by how much. And then from a discharge rate standpoint, it shows the pass/fail on our audited discharge rates.
And the highlight of the afternoon, Flexible Reporting. So this was a joint effort between Kimley-Horn and Autodesk. The Kimley-Horn team identified the many needs that they have from a reporting standpoint. And it's all over the board with all the different jurisdictions that they work in.
So we needed a tool that was flexible enough to be able to handle any situation that an engineer would be put in to report out results. So the intent behind it is it's going to look really familiar, and it's going to look like a spreadsheet. And it's going to report out rational results from network design wizard, but also those dynamic SWMM results from the analysis. It's going to look at any of the inputs. And we can define and reconfigure any of those columns that we need to to any configuration that we need.
And above all, we can save that configuration so we can use it later. So it's less downtime with someone trying to fiddle with the columns and such and the inputs or the available items in that report to get that as quickly as possible.
So we have to load in, make sure our results are current. And then we'll go into the Flexible Reporting that's in the File tab. So that'll open up. And like we saw with Tim's portion of the Flexible Reporting, so we've got any and all of the inputs and outputs available in InfoDrainage we can turn on and off to create our report.
And this is much, much faster. Even though Kimley-Horn has all those spreadsheets that they've used over the years built already, this is, from a simulation standpoint, much faster to be able to check on and off what we want. And then we can also rearrange all those columns as we see fit.
So the ability to also change what phases we're using in InfoDrainage with the dropdown menu is super helpful. If you have an erosion sediment control phase or a final phase, we can report out that. We can report out any of those flow paths that we have. Or we can report out everything. So that's totally up to the engineer.
And then any of those rainfall events that we ran in the simulation, those are also available. And you can change the dropdown to whatever results you want, and it will show up instantaneously. And like I mentioned before, we can bring in that template that we saved before. And it's literally three clicks of a button.
Should you also need to do any further adjusting to the results, we do have the ability to export out those results to Excel for any further manipulation that we might need if we have to add whatever column or data that we need to add to that. And that will finish out the reporting component of it.
But then, what's the use of doing all of the modeling without actually getting that data back into Civil 3D? So we'll go through the results migration but then also the data that gets brought into the extended data sets. So like before, we've got to bring in the set all of our results to make sure that data will get transferred over. So we run all of our simulations, save that file.
And then this is where it gets important with these files that David had mentioned before. So the original file that we exported from needs to be the same file that we import to. And similarly with the InfoDrainage file, if we did a copy of that file or something or and manipulated that copy of the file, well, it's going to get a little funky when we try to bring it into Civil 3D. So we have to use those original files that we were using from the design process.
So importing those, we just have to select that file that we saved in the previous step. And we'll tell it we want to bring in that storm phase. We want not to load the surface since the surface is already in Civil 3D. And then we tell it we need whatever storm event we want, we need to tell it to load all those results when it brings everything over.
And similar to the export process, we need to make sure that all of the mappings are set properly, and we can do that with an imported template file. And then it will go through. It'll take a minute or so. And it'll chug on what the new model is. And then if there's anything that it ended up having to duplicate or something like that, it'll give you a warning. And then we can go in and make any further adjustments to it.
So as we can see, we can see the HGL line there in orange. We have to set that style, that pipe style, to show that HGL. Similarly with the labels that if we have a preset label that includes the return period and the flow value, it will show that. We can also go through and create any combination of styles that we want.
And additionally, it will go through and update any of the structure styles as well. So if you've got the structure styles that are set up to show whatever values we need-- Tim, Tim, can you get Development on this? This screen is terrible. I can't read it.
TIM YARRIS: Can't read it?
MIKE PIZZINO: The contrast is off.
TIM YARRIS: Yeah, I've heard that.
DAVID GARRIGUES: I would agree, Tim. That's been a thing for a long time. And I think all of our viewers out there, I think if you put that on your little report when they do the little QR code, I think they'd want to talk about that, by the way. Just saying, Tim. Enough time has gone by. It's time to fix some stuff, man. You got some lingering things, man. It's a color palette, for goodness sakes, man!
TIM YARRIS: So this is where you mentioned earlier the "we'll beat up on Tim later," this is that portion.
DAVID GARRIGUES: This is that point, yeah. Thank you.
MIKE PIZZINO: We're there. So from a property data standpoint-- or property set standpoint, excuse me-- it also brings in some additional data that we can target with a property set label. While Tim and David were sparring over there, it also brings in that pond as a surface. So if you had to paste that into another surface, we have the ability to do that as well.
And then, yep. The HGL shows in the structure style. And David, how would you like to close this out? I have finished Flexible Reporting. It is awesome. And is there anything else David would like to see with Flexible Reporting or anything else?
DAVID GARRIGUES: Yes, I do think that I'd like to see more combinations of equations where I can put in my own equations and those kind of things, just like we do inside Civil 3D when we get into our parametric pieces and stuff like that. So I'd like to be able to see some of that inside here. So thank you, Mike, for asking.
MIKE PIZZINO: Duly noted.
DAVID GARRIGUES: Yes, so there you go, Tim. One more thing to go do. But you got this. You guys got this. Carolyn, you got teams, man. There's people. There's people. We're all needing these things. So thank you. Thank you, all.
TIM YARRIS: Appreciate your faith in us, David.
CAROLYN ROSE: Yeah.
DAVID GARRIGUES: All right, well, I think that's all we've got for today. But I do want to say thank you to all of you at Autodesk and all of you, our viewers. What we did do is put our email addresses up here. Feel free to contact us, especially Tim Yarris. Always just ping Tim. Just tell him Happy Monday or something like that. He likes to get those kind of emails.
But it's been great to be able to share this partnership story with you all. And we look forward to working with you all and hearing what your ideas are about how can we make this better for everyone. But thank you again for joining us today, and we look forward to seeing you at AU and in the future.
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