Maximizing InfraWorks on Megaprojects Globally

SEAN HULBERT: Hello, and welcome to Maximizing InfraWorks on Megaprojects Globally. Thank you for joining us.

SATYA THENTU: Hello, everyone. My name is Satya Thenu, and I'll be presenting with Sean here today.

SEAN HULBERT: Just in case, we talk about anything that needs to be covered by our safe harbor statement, I've brought that up today. And we wouldn't want you to make any purchasing decisions on future-looking functionality in the product, not-- don't believe we'll be covering any of that, but just in case we do. And if we do get into that arena, we will definitely make sure to let you know.

Our agenda today. We're going to start out with our introductions, and then we're going to go ahead and get started by setting some expectations about why we went through this journey with leveraging InfraWorks on megaprojects. We're going to talk a lot about the model purpose and then understand how we did our data management, the model conversions, and the understanding of why it's important to have a data management scheme in place prior to starting such a large task.

We're going to talk about performance optimization, how to make sure that the model is performing to the-- to optimal performance, excuse me. And we want to make sure that we talk about the individual elements that we've leveraged in the model and how we optimize those elements.

And then we're going to talk about a-- we're going to show you a demonstration on how we were able to leverage InfraWorks on these mega projects and show and share some of the tips and tricks in areas that we leveraged alternative workflows to improve the process.

SATYA THENTU: OK, so with that, we'll talk about ourselves a little bit before we jump into the topic. So my name is Satya Thenu. I'm an electrical engineer by training and hold a professional engineering license in the State of Maryland. I've been with Bechtel about 16 years now, 18 years in the industry. And at Bechtel here, I work as the BIM Operations Manager responsible for BIM planning and deployment across all our projects globally within the Infrastructure Business Unit.

My passion, I'm also responsible for ISO 19650 implementation so we can carry out BIM in a structured fashion across all our projects globally. And I'm also the Product Manager for ACC/BIM360 in the Bechtel organization. So with that, Sean, over to you.

SEAN HULBERT: Thank you, Satya. And again, my name is Sean Hulbert. I am also a professional engineer here in the State of Oregon. My role at Autodesk is a Principal Implementation Consultant. And what that means is that I get the opportunity to work with our customers in more of a hands-on environment and create that partnership between Autodesk and the customers when working on projects such as these large projects that you'll see us looking at.

I've been an engineer-- I've been in the industry for over 30 years now, starting out more as a Autodesk customer. And for about 25 years and been here at Autodesk for eight years. My passion has always been around introducing disruptive technologies to the civil infrastructure community. I'm realizing that there's a lot of opportunity to introduce innovation, introduce efficiencies, and overall provide a better solution to our customers. What about Bechtel, please, Satya?

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, I'll do that. So like I said, I'm the Operations Manager for the Infrastructure Business Unit, and I thought I'd introduce a bit more about what we do here at Bechtel. So for those of you who have not heard about Bechtel, we are 125-year-old company. Earlier this year, we just celebrated our 125th anniversary. It's a privately-held company.

And in the visual there, you can see how we organize ourselves as different business units. I'm part of the second box there, the Infrastructure Business Unit. And this is where we do rail projects, highways, hydro dams, power plants, PV solar plants, as well as heavy civil work. So we'll talk about some of that today, how we've used InfraWorks and on these megaprojects.

But outside of the Infrastructure Business Unit, we also have our Energy Business Unit that does oil, gas, and chemicals type of work, and sustainable energy and water work out of our Houston office. Infrastructure is headquartered in London. Mining and Metals, that's headquartered in Chile. And then our newest business unit, Manufacturing and Technology, just started last year. And then the last one is the Nuclear Security and Environmental that does environmental cleanup as well as Department of Energy and Department of Defense work.

So as you can see, we have our hands full with all of the different business units that we work in. And within these business units, we also work with all types of contract types. So we take pride in EPC, calling ourselves an EPC practitioner. So most of our projects are EPC projects. But in addition to that, we take that expertise and apply it to other types of project delivery as well.

So what that means is we also take that self-perform execution experience and we apply that and help our customers in a Project Management Consultant role, in a PMC role, or a Delivery Partner, DP role, across projects. So even though we may not be directly executing construction or engineering, we are responsible-- we take a lot of work we do where we provide project management services and construction management services.

So if you've not heard of Bechtel, now you know. And so some of our signature projects that we're very proud of that I'd like to touch on is one of them is the Hoover Dam. So those of you who know about Hoover Dam, it was built by a consortium called Six Companies, and out of that Six Companies, Bechtel is the only company that's still in business For. The past 100-plus years under the same name and the same owner.

So we have our fifth-generation CEO, Brendan Bechtel, running the company now. And in other parts of the world, in UK, our high-speed rail 1, HS1. That's a project that will help delivered. The Big Dig Project in Boston or the Jubail Industrial City which we've master planned and built from scratch since 1970s. And it's a thriving city with hundreds of thousands of people living there. So just a few projects.

SEAN HULBERT: Thank you, Satya. So, let's start by talking about setting expectations and understanding the purpose for why we went through this journey of creating these models for these megaprojects.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, so before we talk about InfraWorks and how we've applied InfraWorks, we thought we should spend a little bit of time on the evolution of the design process and taking a look at this famous curve that we may all have seen in one part of our career or the other.

This is the MacLeamy curve where there's four curves there that you see, but in general, what it shows you is the amount of effort across the project lifecycle and its impact on cost of the project. So if you take a look at that first curve there, what it's showing there is during the pre-design is where you have the design decisions that you make have the most impact on cost. And your ability to influence cost goes down as the project lifecycle progresses.

Curve 2 there is showing you what I said. So if you try to make changes during the construction and administration portion as the project delivery lifecycle progresses, you would have to incur significant cost or effort, which is cost again. So that's what's showing.

What traditionally we've seen large projects do or all projects do is the method 3 there where usually the contractor is not involved at pre-design and the schematic phase, and designs complete, and then contractor comes on board, and there are changes that could impact design. And so that would have an impact on cost for sure.

And curve 4 there shows that ideal project delivery method-- industry calls that the integrated project delivery, but even if it's not the integrated project delivery method, bringing your contractor on board during the early phases of the design process would ensure that there's minimal design changes and that construction contractors' input, the constructability, path of construction, all of that is taken into consideration during the design process to minimize any cost changes, cost ballooning during the later phases of the project. So that's-- yeah. Next slide, please.

OK, so now that we've taken a look at the MacLeamy curve and how it's a good idea to bring your contractor on board upfront to look at construction planning, let's talk about how you can use InfraWorks in achieving that goal where you're not--

One of the criticisms that we typically hear on our projects-- and I'm sure everybody in the industry hears that-- is people who are used to doing the method, executing the work, the CAD method with the CAD methodology.

We're always focused on drawing production as opposed to-- I think with the integrated project delivery or the BIM methodology, when you apply that, what you would see that there is a great importance or need to do a lot of that early modeling because that would have a significant impact on, like I was saying, a contractor's ability to execute the work in the way it was designed.

So InfraWorks is a great tool for that. And let's talk about InfraWorks now where how Bechtel has used for conceptual design, but bringing our concept design models into real-world context. And that's the key, is understanding the real-world context of all of the projects that we're building. At the end of the day, it's a physical asset that we're building and how it impacts the real world. So let's talk about that.

So InfraWorks, you most of you may be familiar with it. But we're talking about a couple of use cases there where we're-- on our projects, we aggregate large volumes of data as soon as we have survey data coming in, so we can have-- or our drone imagery coming in, all of that we would like to integrate that as soon as possible.

And then the next one is streamlining processes with conceptual design tools. So we're not going to talk about that a whole lot, but all of the concept design that we do know that does incorporate the engineering principles. And InfraWorks has inbuilt tools that already do that.

And then the last one is using compelling visuals to evaluate your designs and communicating design intent to stakeholders. So that's where I think most of the focus of this session would be, is doing the other two bullets that we talked about in creating those compelling visuals and communicating your construction project execution.

So some of us may think, why InfraWorks? There's Civil 3D, there's Navisworks that you may be able to achieve a lot of these things. Why do I need to use InfraWorks? So let's talk about that a little bit. So what you see there in the bottom there are the comparison of the same design in three different tools.

This is on one of our hydro projects, a hydro dam project where we're all used to seeing the Civil 3D view of contour maps. So we do our corridor design and grading, but it's often from the visual perspective-- it's messy and not easily readable for especially a non-Civil 3D user. So that's the limitation of Civil 3D.

Navisworks, that's a great place to federate your model, coordinate your model. You could use a little bit-- you can add color, but when you aggregate them together, they tend to overlap. And because it's a great tool for federating, but not without-- because of that inability to combine or overlap-- that overlap takes away. So it's not a great tool for rendering and visualizing. But Navisworks is a great tool for clash and coordination.

And that's where InfraWorks comes in. It has the ability to combine multiple civil design elements into a single view and in the real-world context. So you can drape your aerial image onto your surface, different surfaces interacting with each other to show the one finished surface that combines and shows you the final excavation profile there.

So that's the beauty of InfraWorks, is you can create a combined surface in InfraWorks without the need to create those in Civil 3D, which could be the source of that information. Yeah, with that, Sean?

SEAN HULBERT: So as you can see here, what we're doing is we're choosing the right tool for the job. And we've got a number of tools in our tool belt as we just saw. We have InfraWorks, Civil 3D, and Navisworks, but we have additional tools that can be brought into the equation to aggregate the data to tell the story that we're trying to tell from concept to construction.

So as you can see, InfraWorks works well with all of the Autodesk products, and it also works well with some of the non-Autodesk products through the Navisworks engine.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, and that is very important to us here at Bechtel, and I'm sure all of the other companies would agree that even though we love Autodesk products, we do end up using other vendors' tools as well. So on our-- in the other business units that we use our SmartPlant 3D on our plan projects or our AVEVA E3D. But because they can all be brought into Navisworks, and through that, we are able to bring them into InfraWorks.

SEAN HULBERT: And then as you know, Autodesk and Esri have had a longrunning partnership. And so we're able to both consume data from the Esri Database or the ArcGIS Databases, as well as publish that information back out, giving us the opportunity to communicate with a much broader audience.

And then from that point, we can take our InfraWorks model and bring it into some additional software for four-dimensional modeling or for enhanced visualization activities. So what you can see here is the data that we're aggregating includes a number of different sources, as well as the information that we're building in our InfraWorks model, continues to enhance the story that we're telling to our audience, as well as provide us the tools to not only tell our stories, but to continue the design processes.

So one of the things we talk about is setting our expectations. We're moving beyond the basics here with this particular engagement because we're using the tool in a much more expanded effort. As you'll see as we go through some of the processes, we actually are not using the tool in its traditional capabilities, we're actually leveraging it to enhance the capabilities, so to speak.

So we're not just visualizing, but we're using the visualization-- or we're visualizing, not just federating in the real-world context. And so the other important part about InfraWorks is that it's not just the conceptual tool. As you'll see here later in our conversation we're using it in the conceptual portions of the project, but also throughout the construction activities to help us plan those activities as well.

So in the model purpose here, what you're going to see is that we've got our conceptual planning, we've got our preliminary design, we've got our construction staging, our project phasing, our stakeholder collaboration and communication, and then public information.

Because as we know, that people who are not familiar with the AEC community, or the Architectural Engineering Construction community, they are not able to visualize 3D from plan and profile or from plan and elevation as well as people who are creating that documentation. So a tool that gives us the ability to expand that conversation or to help people understand better makes everybody's life easier.

And so let's look at the management of the data and the conversion of the models needed to bring all of this or aggregate this data together and create our InfraWorks models. So the purpose of this particular conversation is understanding the level of information need.

And so what that means is that if we're showing a model that includes an entire campus facility, we don't need to get down to the granular aspects of what's going on inside the individual buildings that are on this campus, that's not the story we're telling.

So in InfraWorks, I like to tell people to think of themselves as the director of the story or the director of the movie that you might create leveraging this tool. And so one of the interesting things that we were able to do was leverage a common data environment starting out in BIM360 and then moving over into ACC to make sure that we were able to share the information that we were working on, and we were literally sharing it across the pond, so to speak.

So the colleague who should be here with us today, Satya, has chosen to move on to another company, but he's done a lot of this work for us, and we want to give a shout-out to [? Tech ?] because it was really his passion that got us to this point in conjunction with the partnership between Bechtel and Autodesk, but we definitely wanted to give him a shout-out.

We also wanted to let you know that this was a collaborative effort between a lot of different parts of the Bechtel Corporation and Autodesk. So we had help from the support side, we had help from development, obviously the consulting side was included. So it truly was a partnership. And for one of our particular workflows, we made a slight modification to an existing bridge workflow that's in InfraWorks to show the modeling of a gondola system on a particular site.

So for example, the bridge piers became the gondola towers, the bridge deck became the wires, and we were able to, as you'll see here, produce some pretty interesting results. So performance. Making sure that the model elements are optimized as we bring them in.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. Thank you, Sean. Yeah, I think you touched on this, I think, in the previous slide where I think understanding what you want to do, the story you wanted to tell is the most important thing. And I'll let you talk about this, and then I think I'll add my two cents in the next slide.

SEAN HULBERT: Sure, thank you, absolutely. So this is where we realize that we were trying to bring a lot of information, and we understand that InfraWorks has the ability to deal with a lot of data but we were pushing the limits truly. And you'll see some of that when we show you some of the statistics that we have to share.

But it was critical for us to simplify the Civil 3D surfaces wherever practicable. We leveraged ArcGIS to decimate some point cloud information as we were bringing it in. We also needed to make sure that we were being selective about what we were showing because fixtures are not needed inside a model when you're doing an overall fly-through I was saying previously on a campus environment.

And so like I say, and you'll see this in our next slide here, and Satya will talk to that, but considering the level of detail or level of information need is critical when building these type of models.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, absolutely, Sean. So let's talk about this particular project. What we were doing on this project, this is a project in a mountainous region. This is a megaproject. So I know we talked about using InfraWorks on megaprojects, but we did not define what a megaproject is.

But every project that we're talking about today is $1 billion-plus. So these are large projects. So on in this particular use case, what we were doing is we wanted to simulate the movement of material and people in a mountainous region. And because there were no access roads and this was a greenfield site, we wanted to use a gondola system.

And what Sean's showing there and what we're showing there is the gondola with a high level of detail. The gondola model that we got from the gondola vendor. We also got the station model that we built out, and then the roller system, the roller mechanism that you're seeing on the top-right there.

And each one of these were given to us as detailed models. And back to the point that Sean was making, the story that we were trying to tell was really simulating that movement of gondola over the mountainous region. And so we had to simplify the geometry of these elements in order to build the simulation.

And because we were also bringing in the real-world context using drone imagery, the InfraWorks model file for this was fairly large. It was in the order of 80 gigabits-- sorry, gigabytes, 80 GB. And so we really needed to simplify these elements to be able to simulate this in the mountainous back background. So that's what you see there, is the simulation. Anything to add there, Sean?

SEAN HULBERT: No, I think that you've covered it, just about everything we wanted to chat about in that particular slide, but just to let you know that this animation that we're providing, we leverage 3ds Max and some well-published and documented workflows, bringing information from InfraWorks through Civil 3D to then create an animation in Max that we can then bring over into InfraWorks to show this movement. And you'll see a little more of that later on a wind farm.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah.

SEAN HULBERT: So one of the things that was important for us to consideration is there is a limit in TIN technology. TIN technology does not like vertical faces. It also deals with-- when we're built-- when we're in aggregating models on the edges where data meets, we get some unexpected behavior sometimes.

So as you can see here, as we were bringing in our Civil 3D surfaces, you can see that there were some spikes in the InfraWorks model surface that we had leveraged, or the LiDAR data that was collected here for this particular example.

Now, because the way that we're using the model and that these are not final design documentations, we were able to use things like coverage areas to correct this for the aesthetic purposes. And with no negative impact to the overall model, functionality, or purpose.

And again, you heard me mention that TIN technology does not like vertical faces, so that was one of the areas that we ran into a little bit of a challenge or a scenario that we needed to take into consideration as we were doing our model.

And those considerations included ensuring that the individual elements that we were bringing into the model, even just elements to-- as furniture into the model, we also wanted to consider the level of detail that those elements contained because we know that a project this size, when you bring in the amount of information that's needed to tell the story, you can start overwhelming the tool with the amount of data.

So we were very conscious of making sure that the information that were brought in was as optimized as possible. And so here, you can see the triangulation of the LIDAR surfaces as well as the Civil 3D surfaces that were used to create the model that we're using to tell our story.

So we'll start out here with the demonstration, we'll go into some of the individual models that we have created, and we'll show you how the team was able to put all of this together and tell the story that we were aiming to tell.

SATYA THENTU: OK. So I'll talk about this construction staging. So as a construction contractor, like I was saying earlier, it's important that we plan out all of our construction activities upfront by working with the design team and ensuring that we have all of the various elements planned for during the design stage.

So when we talk about planning construction activities, we're talking about your site preparation activities, identifying your lay-down areas, your temporary access roads, your utility connections, your excavation, and path of construction most importantly. So all of these are construction activities and more that we think about when we are planning our construction projects.

And beyond the boundaries of the job sites-- this is within the project job site, but beyond the boundaries, you could also use InfraWorks to plan out your traffic changes and minimize the impact to the neighborhood, whether that be your visual, just traffic noise, or any other disturbance due to construction. So you could use InfraWorks to tell all of these stories. So let's take a look at how we've done that.

SEAN HULBERT: In addition to telling the stories about the construction staging activities, we've also leveraged InfraWorks, as you'll see later in our slide deck here, for our site analysis to help us make critical decisions about the projects that we're working on and the impacts that those projects will have, again, to the surrounding communities.

We leveraged a variety of different terrain themes to show these stories, as you'll see here shortly, as well as the opportunities to use feature themes if needed, and then the GIS data aggregation portion was critical to making sure that we were able to consume data based on GIS-- or consume data from GIS databases that helped us further tell the story that we'll see here shortly. And did you--

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, so--

SEAN HULBERT: --on the animations--

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, sure. So this one's the same project that looked at a few minutes ago where we took help from-- starting with Sean right from the implementation side, consulting side of Autodesk, with Dave Lawrence, who was our [? PSE, ?] as well as the product team. All were instrumental in making that workflow possible.

So we've used all levels of support from Autodesk in simulating and telling that story of how we're going to be building up a gondola system on this mountainous project.

SEAN HULBERT: So let's take a peek at how we leveraged InfraWorks for our construction staging activities. So as you can see on this hydro project, we're just looking at the physical dam site, but I think it's also important to understand that, if I'm not mistaken, there was a 26-kilometer road that was required in addition.

SATYA THENTU: Yep, that is right. That's a greenfield site in the middle of nowhere, so we had to plan for a 26-kilometer access roads to the final dam location.

SEAN HULBERT: And so the survey data that we were provided with was a 0.5-meter by 0.5-meter LIDAR grid. We had 50 panels with 4 million points in them each. So now you can start to understand why it was critical for us to do our model element optimization.

We were understanding the need of the model had multiple purposes as you can see here. And so as we are aggregating all of our data together, you'll see that we have entities coming from different elements. The dam that you'll see here was actually modeled in, as you might expect, in Revit. And then we used a number of polygon shapes to define the areas where we would do our rock-crushing activities, where we would have our lay down yards or our staging areas.

And so as we creep through this journey here, you'll see that each of these areas were identified, and we were leveraging InfraWorks to make sure that the areas that we were doing our construction activities in would impact the surrounding areas, and as you can see, they're surrounding farmland. We didn't want to cause a significant impact on those communities, so we were taking into consideration leveraging the natural environment to help minimize that impact to the community.

So one of those particular activities is where we were doing some excavation, we ensured that the excavation was on the dam side or the reservoir side of the site, thereby not being visible to anybody in the downstream community.

Continuing to look at that, as you can see, we've also minimized the road impact to the surrounding hillside, but if you look up here in the upper-left corner, you'll see that right behind those two yellow arrows are pointing to the same location, and what we've done here is, like I said, ensured that the quarry site had little to minimal impact aesthetically to the surrounding communities and farmland areas.

And then in construction sequencing-- so what we did was we leveraged InfraWorks to help us tell our construction sequencing activities. So all of these elements were created in Civil 3D. And then we were able to bring those in and then show a simulated four-dimensional model of those activities.

So as we go through time, you can see that we are staging the construction-- or showing the construction sequencing by each of these surfaces being added, and then we actually leveraged the view frames inside Civil-- inside InfraWorks to capture these images that we're showing here. And so we started at the top of the hill with our construction activities, and now we're cut all the way down to where the dam will begin. You want to talk about site analysis, Satya?

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. So let's talk about site analysis. So this was another hydro dam in another region. I think what we're noticing across the world is we're going after more sustainable projects, and hydro dam is one of them. So this is in Australia. So what we are talking-- going to talk about is how we've used InfraWorks for some basic terrain analysis.

So if you go to the next slide there, Sean, you can see that we've used different colors to show different elevation bands there. So brown is the low elevation there, and green is the high elevation with light green being the highest elevation. So that's one visual.

And then the second visual here, this is also showing the slope bands here. So red being very steep areas, green being less steep, and their ideal location for establishing construction lay-down areas or platforms for offices and worker camps. So this is a quick way of doing that.

And then this last one, what we're showing here is showing ideal location for a PV solar project. So this was a PV-hydro with a solar project. So what we were seeing there is that each color represents one direction. And as for PV solar, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, your panels need to be facing south, and if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, your panels need to be facing north for maximizing your solar production.

So here, you can see different directions in different colors and quickly identify the best location for your PV panels-- PV farm, solar farm.

OK, so this next one is a different project. This one is a wind farm project where we've used InfraWorks to create a storyboard on how a wind farm-- the entire project is developed, the layout and different areas. So what we did here was imported GIS layers as coverage areas or point of interest. And we've taken different colors to identify different features here. So Sean, do you have anything to add here on this one?

SEAN HULBERT: No, I think-- well yeah, absolutely. I think that this is showing how we are truly leveraging data to build a model that will help us tell the story that we're working to tell for our end user or for our audience. As I said, what we're seeing here is we're looking at the individual environmentally-protected area. We're looking at areas where we are excluded from working in for different reasons, whether they're cultural reasons or if they're environmentally-- again, environmentally protected.

And then you're seeing us leverage InfraWorks to actually show the locations of the specific areas where we'll be doing our work, as well as the surrounding dwellings that could be impacted by these construction activities. And so you're seeing the different planned phases of the wind farms show up in the different colors as-- and the impacts as they are overlaid over the different areas that are being impacted. And then you'll see-- we're showing the roads are being implemented or being highlighted here in the model.

SATYA THENTU: Yep. That's right, Sean. So I think this project, the idea was to build that in six phases. So what you see on the north side, the purple color is where we begin. And we're coming from north to the south end with purple cluster A and B being purple color and blue, and then-- yeah, I think blue and purple being cluster C and D. And then green is cluster E and F.

And additionally, you're seeing the wind turbines shown there, as well as all of high-voltage work that needs to be done, all of that is shown in one visual here.

SEAN HULBERT: And so we're showing the complete connection of the construction activities leveraging InfraWorks.

SATYA THENTU: That is right.

SEAN HULBERT: So, one of the other advances here or one of the other areas that we were ever able to leverage the InfraWorks model was using it for model animation. And so as you can see here, on the same site that we were just demonstrating, is this particular video is going to show the construction staging activities of these individual wind farms.

And you'll see that the wind farms are being constructed. And then as they turn green, these are the completed stages if I'm not mistaken. Correct, Satya?

SATYA THENTU: That is correct, Sean. The red color and the cyan are the 33-kV and 330-kV high-voltage lines. And as the work is being completed, yeah, they're all turning green. So you're right.

SEAN HULBERT: And then you're seeing that we're continuing to leverage the data and the information-- or the data and information that we've put into the model throughout the design processes.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah.

SEAN HULBERT: And then here's another example. And this is actually a fly-through of the same site. And one of the things I'd like to point out as we get close, is you'll actually see the turbines moving. So we leverage that model animation to bring more life to the model that we've built and to the story that we're trying to tell. And again, you can see the roadway activities, all of the different--

SATYA THENTU: Clusters of colors.

SEAN HULBERT: Absolutely. Anything you want to add to this?

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. And those yellow boxes are these mini-substations to collect the power from the wind turbines. And what you don't see are the 33-kV and the 330-kV lines, not in this particular visual, but you saw that in the other visual.

SEAN HULBERT: And I think one of the-- to steal one of [? Tech's ?] quotes, what was it? If a picture tells a thousand words, a movie tells a million or--

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. The InfraWorks model tells you a thousand pictures. It is worth a thousand pictures.

SEAN HULBERT: Our next slide here. And so as we were continuing to work through our processes, we started to understand that there's some additional value that we were able to gain once our InfraWorks model was constructed.

So as I mentioned earlier, some of the additional value could be pushing it into some more visualization software, some of the Autodesk offerings such as the Oasis Tool that is soon to come out. Bring that in and allow you to work in an XR environment. But in addition to that, we found some other value that thought was quite interesting. Did you want to share, Satya?

SATYA THENTU: Yes. So communication is the key, is you need to be able to communicate across not only just your team, but also on these large projects with your client and all of the local people. So in this case, we've leveraged InfraWorks models to create a 3D print representation, 3D print of the InfraWorks model to physicalize that. And so we could take that as part of our proposal to the owner and show what our plan is and how we're going to execute the project.

SEAN HULBERT: And I thought it was very interesting that the actual reservoir piece as well as the dam piece were 3D-printed to be detachable from the model. I think that was quite ingenious.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah, it was. So I think in this case, we did have to change the resolution. From the survey resolution, we had to reduce it to-- for that resolution to be suitable for the 3D printer to create that physical model, print that physical model. And then we used the FBX file format with the survey orthophoto as the texture.

SEAN HULBERT: Thank you. Then we got larger. Let me try it again.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. This is the gondola project that we shared earlier. And I believe we also used some airbrushing technique to show the-- highlight the elevations there because this entire region is mountainous and we wanted to show that clearly.

SEAN HULBERT: So again, the same process was leveraged, built the information inside InfraWorks, leveraged the FBX Export Tool, and then a 3D model printing company was employed to create a very impressive model.

SATYA THENTU: That is correct.

SEAN HULBERT: So in conclusion, basically we went through a journey that, in our opinions and from my experience, we've stretched the abilities of InfraWorks to some very interesting limits. And we're going to continue to keep pushing these limits because we know that the tool does offer value in these type of scenarios.

So we started out by talking about those expectations, why we did this model to begin with. And then we started talking about some of the lessons we learned. We really started to understand that we needed to have that common data environment to share all of the information that we have. We also needed to make sure that the information that we have was meeting the level of information that we needed to share.

We understood that there were significant-- not significant, but there were efforts needed to simplify the models that we were bringing in because as you could see earlier, we didn't need to model every aspect of a dam to actually tell the story that that's actually a dam that we're building.

And so the optimization was definitely one of those areas that we wanted to focus and share that that was where we found a lot of success when we started digging into the model. And then we wanted to share the demonstration. We were telling you a story about building these tools, leveraging this tools, and until you see it, I think, in the real-world environment, it doesn't really-- doesn't sink in. Would you agree?

SATYA THENTU: That is correct, Sean. And I think to call InfraWorks just a conceptual design tool doesn't do justice. I think it is up to the end user, like ourselves, on how we can leverage these tools in a way that fits our needs.

SEAN HULBERT: And I definitely embraced the partnership between Bechtel and Autodesk. I thought it was a great experience, from my perspective, I think for both companies. I think we both-- we've learned a lot and we've really solidified the fact that we're more than just a software vendor, but we're a partner with our customers.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah. And I'd like to, once again, shout out to [? Tech ?] for really making that happen and working with the Autodesk team to stretch the limits of InfraWorks here.

SEAN HULBERT: I would say that it was definitely a labor of love of technology that he exhibited and the desire to push the limits on software in general.

SATYA THENTU: Yeah.

SEAN HULBERT: Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We really hope that you find a lot of value out of the presentation that we shared today, and we hope to see you in a future presentation.

SATYA THENTU: Thank you.