Model-centered Bridge Design: Combine Inventor, Revit, and InfraWorks in Real Projects

JOE BRENNER: All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Looks like we're good.

So welcome, everyone. I'm Joe Brenner from WSP, and this is my partner, Nick Seman, from Gannett Fleming.

NICK SEMAN: Hello.

JOE BRENNER: And we're going to talk to you today about a process we developed for model-centered or model-centric bridge design. So Nick and I got started in this while I was working for Gannett Fleming. About four years ago, a client came to us and asked us to create some test models to see what they could get out of them-- test bridge models.

So we took a look at the tools that were available to us, created the models for them, and at the end of the process, and we delivered it back to the client. And they weren't ready to do much with it at this point. But in the process, we realized that there were some benefits in using some of these tools, a lot of which we're going to show you here today, that we weren't taking advantage of in our typical workflows.

So we went back and worked on this process. Created a viable process that we have since used for multiple production bridge projects. So we're going to go through, show you some examples, and illustrate that process for you here today.

So here are our learning objectives. This is going to drive what we're going to talk about here today. So first we're going to look at how bridge design workflows can be improved with this kind of approach.

We're going to look specifically at Autodesk Inventor as the engine to drive some of our geometric and parametric bridge components. And then we're going to look at exporting those concrete bridge elements to Revit for reinforcement. And then finally, we're going to integrate additional tools such as Robot and Infraworks to look at how we can enhance the process.

So first, what is model-centric design? This is obviously not a new idea. Industries have been doing this for years. In some cases decades, right? Obviously the vertical construction industry has the BIM process, which I'm sure you've all heard enough about. It's the definite buzz word of the week.

But bridge does have its own specific challenges. So we have some complex geometry. Even in the most typical and simple bridges, we have horizontal curvature often, and vertical curvature, parabolic curvature. That again, typically the vertical industry doesn't have to deal with.

Also, the industry is highly standardized. And what I mean by that is each state or bridge owner has their own standards and how they want to see them. So a bridge abutment in Nevada is not going to look like the bridge abutment in Pennsylvania.

And I think because of some of those reasons, the bridge-specific software is-- the industry is a little bit fragmented. So we're going to take a look at-- these are definite challenges, but we're going to show you how we can overcome them with using some of the tools that are currently available to us. Might not necessarily be bridge-specific software, but we can use them.

So how can workflows be improved by this process? Essentially, the 3D model is really just a central repository of information-- of data. Geometric, physical properties. Also material properties, such as concrete strength, can be embedded in the model.

So then we enter that information in one time in a single source of truth, and then we reuse that data or that information for different design activities. That also reduces the amount of rework or the ability or the potential for errors in fat finger type user entry errors. It also helps us respond to changes.

So again, same type of idea. We change the data or whatever we need to change in the model, and then that data is automatically linked to our drawings or our quantities analysis model. Quantities-- that's really just a by-product of doing anything in three dimensions. You get volumes in everything from our model.

Generation of 2D plans-- this is an obvious output for us. That's still our deliverable that we need to have to the client. But really as far as when we use the model, the plans-- the details are really just views of the model. So we know if it's right in the model, we know it's going to be right in that drawing. And not only that, not in that one specific drawing, but any drawing that we have or detail that we have linked to that model is going to be right.

Scheduling, particularly rebar scheduling-- we get some automation from that. And it depends on-- I know some owners have the designers do the rebar schedule. Some let the fabricators do that. But in our case, most of our owners want us to do the schedule. So we'll show you how we can automate that process.

And finally, visualization. Obviously with a 3D model, we're going to have visualization with the physical model. But we'll show you some of the detail we're talking about. I mean, this is down to pre-stressed beam camber. That kind of detail that we get a full visual model of what we're designing in the design phase in the virtual environment.

So here, just a general workflow diagram here. First, our first process is going to be to create our parametric solids. And as I mentioned, we're going to use a program called Autodesk Inventor to do that. Nick's going to show you a lot of what we've done with that.

From there, we can take that model and do some structural analysis with that. We're going to show an example of how we can use Robot. And from there, once we're happy with the design analysis, we can export our solids to Revit for reinforcement. Nick will show you a little bit of-- we've also developed some tools inside of Inventor to do the same thing.

And then finally, this is, again, a 2D contract plans as the output. But we can do our final detailing and annotation really in any CAD program. I show that because we use this process when we actually have a final deliverable of DJN file to the client. So we can use-- everything we're showing you here today can be and has been used for that process when we have a deliverable that's not a Revit model or even a DWG.

Two things that are overarching goals or themes, and what we're going to show you here today is scalability and interoperability. Scalability-- we'll show you here these examples. These are typical, every day bridges that are in design and construction all over the country each day.

So in order to make this as accessible to bridge engineers, who are not traditionally the most progressive group of individuals-- I'm sure the people in this room are technology savvy and progressive. But we want to try to only make it as complex as we absolutely need to, to get more people involved-- have it be more accessible.

And then interoperable really between software packages. We try to do as much as we can in one software solution. It just makes sense to do that. But what we found is for certain activities and tasks, certain programs, certain software does things better than others.

So we look for anywhere we can where we have seamless interoperability between software to get our model into the right software package for that particular task. So we're going to show you how we've used some Autodesk products to do that. So I'm going to turn this over to Nick, and he's going to get into do a little intro into Inventor and a live demo.

NICK SEMAN: How do we get to the next slide?

JOE BRENNER: Just click it.

NICK SEMAN: OK. Be very brief with this. Why Inventor? Everybody here has heard a whole lot this week about BIM, right? I'm seeing all kinds of things done in BIM, and I guess I'm an Inventor junkie.

I've designed all kinds of things in Inventor over the last 10, 15 years. And I look at things-- you know, when we started looking at this bridge project, I look at things like Formula One race cars, submersibles. They're designed in Inventor. I'm pretty sure we can take a chunk of concrete with some steel rods in it and probably design it in Inventor as well.

So being versed in Inventor, there were certain goals we wanted to have, which you see up here. Like we wanted exact geometry. Civil 3D-- you model a station here, you model a station there, you interpolate what happens in between it.

Not with Inventor. With Inventor, every dimension can be dead-on if you want it to be. And that was very important to us. We wanted all the geometry to be dead-on.

Other things-- parametric. We wanted to be able to create user variables. We looked at off-the-shelf bridge software design applications, and they just didn't have everything we needed, especially when it came into the customization necessary for each client.

Inventor gave us-- met all the goals we needed, and it gave us the ability to customize it to create our own environment. Our own bridge design software, if you will. There you see the automated tools and functions, build materials-- we could do our deliverable drawings. All that type of stuff right in Inventor.

And the last one on there, create 3D model content. We wanted to have 3D models. We didn't want to have a program like a black box where you just keep typing numbers into it and at the end, some drawings comes flying out the other end. We wanted to have a model that if we needed to interact with it, we could.

So Inventor gives us all this capability. BIM is a great tool if you want to put a window in a wall. That's all that you do. That's super. But the bridge functionality just wasn't there at the time. I'm sure it will come along eventually, but right now, we could design that functionality with Inventor.

So like I said, in short, it gives us the ability to create our own bridge designs application. How many people here have used Inventor? Show of-- OK, so you guys, about 30 maybe are pretty familiar with it. To some, this is real basic.

Inventor, you've got two main types of files. You've got part files. You've got assembly files. Part files is where you create your main content-- your sketches, solids, surfaces, parameters, tools. All that type of stuff happens in your part files.

Assembly files, for those that aren't familiar with it, files where you can take all your part files, bring them together, and make an assembly out of it. Or take subassemblies, bring them together, and make a bigger assembly out of it. You'll see examples of these things. Some of the terms I just used, I'm going to show you. Up a ladder I'll show you. We'll see each one of these items as we go along.

OK, so one main thing. We have a handout that you're not going to see most of the handout up here on the screen today. So you want to print out the handout if this is of interest to you. The handout gets into one of the most important things pretty heavily, and that is we don't want to repeat anything we do.

Every piece of information we create, whether it's a parameter, whether it is a surface, no matter what it is, we want to be able to share it. We want to have that single source of truth, no matter what. And so it gets into the fact that you need to step back from your project, break it down into components, take into account how many people are going to be working on it.

Did we put too much information in one file? And now only one person can get into it? You've got to figure out how you're going to democratize your information. The handout gets into that pretty heavily.

But it's very important. Some of it, if you do it on the fly, it can get pretty tricky to undo and go a different direction. So make sure you spend some time mapping out your project before you just jump in.

Here is a basic project we're going to take a look at. You can see different categories that we've broken down into. Each one of those categories may have sketches, may have parameters, may have solids, may have surfaces that get shared in different ways.

The thing to keep in mind is you can't do a circular sharing. In other words, if the beams exchange information with the abutment, that's fine. But now say the abutment gets information from the beams. OK, great. But now the beams can't get information back from the abutment, necessarily, because you had that circular reference path.

So you've got to keep that in mind when you're planning it out. Think that's about it. Let's jump right into Inventor. So for those of you that use Inventor, some of this will be pretty basic. However, for those of you that don't, hopefully you get something new.

OK, so on that previous diagram, we follow something called skeletal modeling, which is kind of the skeleton in your body. The backbone is connected to the whatever bone, and so forth. And you build off of that.

So this top level part file actually has no solids in it. What it has in it is a sketch, and it has a bunch of parameters. This is just roadway geometry.

So if we take a look at these parameters-- parameters are variables that you can create. The user can create and give names. And you see here, I've assigned semi-intelligent, logical names to them. It's all geometry-related-- horizontal and vertical geometry.

Parameters can contain fixed values. Like right there is a easting value. Or they can contain calculations. Here we're calculating out a vertical curve grade based on PVI stations, PVD stations, et cetera, and elevations. So it's great. You can go into these parameters and you can use the parameters to drive your geometry.

So for example, let's take a look at this grade here in profile view. And you can see that we have one vertical curve. It's a sag curve. It has two tangents leading into it, and a curve in the center, which is in blue. What if we want to change that?

OK, we can go back to the parameters. We can look for the PVI elevation. There it is. Change it to 550. Close it.

Recalculate it. Bang. Now we have a crest curve instead of a sag curve. OK, now we didn't have any parameters in there, and they were pretty logically named with 20 or 30 parameters. You're going to have files with thousands of parameters.

Do you want yourself or other people going into a list of parameters where they can become somewhat cryptically named and change a value? Probably not. So one of the first levels of customization that Inventor gives you is the ability to create a form. So down here, I have a form called Vertical Geometry.

Anybody can create these. Very simple to create. All it is is the organization of particular parameters for a given task. So you can see on here I have vertical curve number one, PVI elevation. And so I changed it to 550 feet. I can simply come back in here, change it back to 531 feet, and there I'm back to a sag curve.

So what I've done here-- now, if I say OK, well, I designed my road in Civil 3D. How can I leverage that information? Parameters can be tied into a spreadsheet. Parameters can be tied into XML files.

So you could have a workflow where you take your geometry from Civil 3D, export it to that type of file, link it to Inventor. Not a problem. For something simple like this, this road horizontally is just a tangent vertically. We have one curve. I have a template that handles that. We can enter the information and move on.

OK, so this is a part file. However, there's no parts in it. It's simply a location where we're storing geometry that the entire rest of the project is going to look at. Never again in any of the other drawings do I enter any of these values. If I need these values, I come back to this drawing and get it automatically. OK, so I'll close this file.

Here's an overview of this bridge. Joe said these are typical, everyday bridges. It's not a cable-stayed bridge. It's not the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. This is the bridge down the street. Just have it up there so you can see what it looks like.

This is an assembly file, and over here are the components that make it up. We've got two abutments, a pier, two sets of beams, and a deck. Very straightforward. Just had up there for Illustrative purposes.

OK, so I'm going to open up now the next step. This is bridge geometry. Now this is another part file, but like I said previously, I'm going to take this up a ladder and show you a little bit more with each type of file.

If we look over here to the left, this is what makes up this particular file. And you can see here is my roadway geometry file. I said that we share data back and forth between these files. In CAD, that's a reference file. You reference one file, and then you can draw over top of it, snap to endpoints, et cetera.

Inventor-- it's a little bit different, because in Inventor, you have more than one type of entity. You have geometry, you have surfaces, solids, et cetera. So if I right-click on this, you see here it says Edit Derived Part. So in Inventor, you're deriving information from another file and that's the name of the command.

So here's my roadway geometry file. You can see it could have bodies-- solid bodies, surface bodies, blocks, sketches, 3D sketches, and so forth. The yellow items indicate what I'm referencing from that file. So here I'm referencing that original roadway geometry, and down here I'm referencing some parameters, but not all. I only needed a few that are necessary to specify the geometry for the bridge.

OK, so if I take a look at the parameter list itself and I sort it, up here are the parameters that I'm calling from the roadway file. These values, I can use in the calculations down here in my new parameters by calling their name. So here I'm calling geometry, horizontal, point of beginning, north. That's coming from up here.

So that's how you share data. You don't have to type that value in again. The only geometry that's contained in this particular file-- you'll see there's not a whole lot of parameters in here. There's a few. But basically, this geometry file outlines the basics of the bridge.

Where are the abutments located? How many piers are there? Where are the piers located? Just basic information. Now you might say, why don't you store that with the piers and the abutments?

Well again, I mentioned that you want to map out your whole project. Information like, where is an abutment located and where is a pier located, is used not only by abutments and piers, but by the beams that connect them-- by the deck that sits on top of the beams. So it was decided that information was better off in a bridge geometry file because it's going to be leveraged by multiple other files, not just one. All the rest of the geometry for piers and abutments and so forth is typically contained in those files.

So I'll close this. And again, everything that's in this file can also be shared outside of this file. So the next file we're going to take a look at here has had to do with beams and whatnot, so I'll open some of those up. Let's see here.

OK, so what I've opened up here are three additional part files. We're still looking specifically at part files. The third one in this hierarchy is again, doesn't really have any parts in it. But it has more information that gets used elsewhere.

So for example, if I zoom in up here, you'll see now I have some template information that contains the template for the cross-section of the deck. Also includes the box beams, haunch, et cetera. There is also, I believe, the side barriers are in this file as well.

Again, these files get used in different places. So we want to have in one location where it can be shared. Geometry-wise-- so you see over here I'm calling in both the geometry from the road and the geometry from the bridge.

We take a look at it again horizontally. We take a look at down here where the bridge starts. This is the vertical curve at the top here. Notice as I zoom in that this geometry is for the first beam, located on the decreasing station side of the bridge.

Notice it is not an exact mimic of the geometry. In fact, while the geometry here is a sag curve, the beam appears to be in a crest curve. That's because we have the camber designed into this. So how powerful can Inventor be?

We have camber designed into it. So again, any dimension, any point elevation we need, is dead on. There is no interpolation. If we need to know exactly what the elevation is right there, we can get it right there.

How do we do that? Inventor is not a bridge design program. How does it know how to calculate camber? When you design sketches, you can put lines, arcs, circles, et cetera, into the sketch.

But there's also a great tool up here under Lines. So again, this is where you would define a line or a spline or whatever. But there is a tool called an equation curve. An equation curve gives you the ability to describe the equation that creates the geometry.

So if I pick this existing beam center line here and I take a look at the Edit Equation Curve-- unfortunately, the dialogue that they give you doesn't allow you to see the whole equation, so I'm going to copy it out of there for you. Paste it in Notepad. OK, there is the equation for the camber. Now how does this work?

Basically an equation curve says, OK, what's the value of y with relationship to x? First off, x is linear. That's your stationing along the bridge. So we have to tell, where does x start? Where does x end?

We have parameters that tell us that. We have parameters named. This is the station for the beginning of the bridge. This is the station for the end of the bridge. So again, no manual input. Just link to a parameter that's already been defined by somebody in the bridge geometry file.

Here, we have the equation for the camber, and it again uses all parameters. There are no values in that equation that could change and be forgotten about. So if a parameter changes, the equation curve changes, the geometry changes.

So when I went back and I flipped it from a sag curve to a crest curve. Had I been in this file, this geometry would have changed as well. OK, so it was really the use of parameters and the use of equation curves that said, hey, this is really a program that's going to let us do what we want to do.

JOE BRENNER: And that can all be controlled with forms. All right, so the end user, the engineer, doesn't have to look at that big, long equation. It can be done through forms [INAUDIBLE].

NICK SEMAN: Right. Yeah, we have a variety of forms down here. There's camber and haunch for beam one, and so forth. So you can break up the forms. You can actually make a workflow where a person goes from form to form to form to fill out the information necessary for the design to progress.

So basically now that's the end of the skeletal files. Between the three files we looked at, each one had a little bit more in it. But this defines all the information that now we can get into creating some parts with.

So we take a look at the beams for span one. The beams for span one are referencing information in the file we just looked at. Also referencing two other files that have solids in them.

OK, so let's take a look at that quick. If I right-click on that and go to Edit Derived Part. You'll see all I'm calling out of these files are a series of solids. So what are these two files?

Well, these are our tools, basically. The geometry that's in here is a tool that I use to create other geometry. Christmastime-- you roll out your cookie dough. You put your star-shaped cookie cutter on there. You take it out. You have a hole that looks like a star, and you have a star that fits exactly in that hole.

Single source of truth goes beyond just parameters. I have a surface at the abutment and at the pier for the dapping of the beams, as this bridge requires that. That surface needs to be replicated to four different places-- the bottom of the beams, the top of the beam seats, and the top and bottom of the bearing pad.

I don't want to go through the steps of creating the geometry four times. I could. But again, it introduces opportunity for errors and omissions. So I create a tool that has that shape, and I use that tool to replicate that geometry four times.

Over here on the left-hand side is a hierarchy of how these beams were created. I'm just going to move the end up to right here, and you're going to see these tools. These are for the abutment, and these are for the pier. And if I zoom in, you can see there's some overlap there between the beam and these tools. These tools have the shape that I want at the bottom of the beam.

So using the combine command in Inventor, I'm able to subtract that shape off the bottom of the beam. I can also use those tools to add that shape to the top of the beam seat and to define the top and bottom of the bearing pads. So again, single source of truth. I'm not going to make a mistake by defining that two different ways in two different places.

Finally, I had the deck. The deck, you can see here, calls in geometry from the road. It calls in the span configuration. The span configuration, if you remember, had the template for the deck, so I could extrude that template for the deck along the vertical geometry from the roadway. It has the beams from span one and the beams from span two.

What do we need the beams for? Well, we had camber on those beams, and we have haunch in the bottom of the deck. So if you take a look, by bringing the beams in, you can see it's thicker here at the ends. Thinner in the center. And then as we approach the pier, it gets thicker again.

The same idea as the dapping for the beams. I have a beam. It already has the top shape that I want. Why would I go define that a second time on the bottom of the deck? I just bring the beam in, subtract it from the deck. I now have the exact shape that I need.

Now, that's great so far. I've been able to do everything I need to do with geometry by using the equation curves and by using parameters, but there's a limit to what you can do sometimes. So I'm going to close these files up and we're going to open up the abutment. And the owner, in this case, has a design requirement for corner blocks that-- I'm not going say it's unusual. It's just a design requirement.

JOE BRENNER: I'll say it's unusual.

NICK SEMAN: OK.

JOE BRENNER: It's unusual.

NICK SEMAN: And what happened was in this particular abutment-- one thing I'll show you about this abutment. There's, again, a part file. But there's multiple parts.

You saw there, there's a footer. There's wing walls. There's corner blocks. There's safety walls, barriers, stem wall, et cetera.

I could have created multiple part drawings for each one of those and shared data in between them. However, the size of this project wasn't gigantic. There's few people working on it. We didn't see a need to break that up.

Bigger projects, certainly. Democratize your information. But you can see here this one part file has multiple parts in it, or multiple solids. Now back to the corner block.

So here's our corner block. And basically, what I'm going to do, just so I can demonstrate what's happening, is I'm going to grab the corner block, I'm going to put a 2D sketch on top of it, and I'm going to trace the outside of the corner block. OK, that's that purple line hopefully you can see there.

I'm going to throw a couple of dimensions on it. This dimension right here, when measured perpendicular to the center of the road, has to be no less than 12 inches. Now, I went to place the dimension there. It says hey, you can't place a dimension here. It's going to over-constrain the shape.

That's fine. This is also a parameter, but it's a reference parameter. You can use reference parameters both to feed you information back or to drive other geometry.

I'm also going to throw a dimension here. This one is going to be aligned with that face. You can see right now it's 12 inches as well. It's also just a reference parameter. And finally, I'm going to throw a dimension back here.

Now what's going to happen here is I'm going to change the bearing of the wing wall. I'm going to bring the wing wall around clockwise so that this point here starts rolling towards the safety wall. Now, what the rule is is this number can never be less than 12 inches.

When this number becomes 12 inches, then this dimension will increase. And you'll see that, because I'm going to run through some examples. So let's see that work.

Now unfortunately, by just simply changing the geometry, I can't hold those parameters. The geometry will change beyond that. So what I've done, just like we're able to create forms to input information, I can create something called a rule.

A rule is basically a simple program that you can write using VB. The rule here just says, hey, if this dimension hits 12 or is less, you need to increase it to 12 and change this other number over here. What triggers it? Well, in this case, it's a small file, so every time I make a change to the geometry, the rule is triggered and the geometry updates.

You can create much more complex coding than this. This is just baby code, if you will. OK, so here's a form I have for the abutment. I'm going to change the deflection of the wing wall from 155 degrees to 150 degrees. You'll see the wing wall roll around clockwise.

Now as it did that, the only change you see-- these two numbers here held at 12. This one did decrease to 24, because you saw this point here roll clockwise as well. OK, so let's change it again.

So so far, I could have done this just by changing the geometry. Not a problem. Change it to 145 degrees.

There, the 12s still hold, but the inside now down to 18. So I'm approaching that 12 inches. Drop it to 140.

140, it gets pretty close to 12 inches. I'm down to 13 inches here. Still holding 12s here. Finally we're going to take it down to something that will force that to go to 12 inches. We'll go to 135 degrees. And--

OK, there's more going on there, because now the formula said, hey, we've got to go make some changes to the shape. I'm holding 12 here, and now you can see this one is increased to 16. So this is an example of what Joe alluded to.

Will a software vendor come up with this type of detail for every potential bridge owner out there? Probably not. But we work for this bridge owner pretty frequently. We want this kind of detail on our bridge product.

So that's an example of how a part file-- you can get in and create coding to help you with your design. It can get dramatically much more complex than this, believe me. OK, how are we doing here? OK, so let me close this guy up.

Joe mentioned rebar in Revit. I'm going to show you something here real fast. I'm a firm believer that I like to see all my work done in as few packages as possible. I believe Inventor is very capable.

I also have staff that is capable of creating some special code for me to do things that I can't do myself. So can we create rebar in Inventor? Yes, as long as it's rusty, I guess there, OK?

[LAUGHTER]

Here is the pier from that project, fully detailed out with rebar. Now, what's the advantage of doing the rebar in Inventor? Well, one thing we can do with it is we can tabulate it using the Inventor build materials schedule. Here's the rebar.

So if I go back and I change the footer dimensions, my rebar will update automatically. The drawings of the rebar will update automatically. My tabulation of the rebar will update automatically. OK, that's great. Is it harder to put the rebar in this than it is to put it in Revit?

With the newest version of Revit and the flexible rebar, that's pretty smooth. However, this is pretty straightforward, too. I'll place a couple of bars quick so you can see. But there's one advantage here that Revit doesn't have. I can do a clash detection between every single bar in that file.

I can make sure that I'm designing rebar that can be built out in the field. In fact, as we were doing this, we saw quite a few of the drawings that were done traditionally that had rebar that couldn't be created, actually. Now, of course, the project gets built. The rebar gets placed, but not exactly the way maybe it was intended by the engineer.

So real quickly, here this is just an assembly file that uses the iCopy command. Inventor gives you multiple ways of creating automatically parts and parts that have different dimensions. The iCopy command is one of those commands that allows me to place a predefined rebar, and you see these work points here.

These work points are based on where those bars need to be placed. All those work points are automatically generated based on the solid geometry we created and parameters. Parameters like, what's the minimum spacing on the rebar? What's the clearance on the rebar? Are there other bars between the minimum clearance and where this bar will be placed?

All that is taken in account, work points are created, and those work points are then used to create the rebar. So I can come in here to the pattern command iCopy. I pick the bar type that I want-- just the seismic bar.

ICopy command comes up. If you name things intelligently, you know what it's looking for. So it's was looking for the centers of the hook, the bend point, and the end point.

Since I have more than one, I pick that. I pick that. I pick that.

Gives me the ability to name these if I want to. It shows you the first one in place. Oh, next. [CHUCKLING]

Now I'll have a dialog box where if I want to include the bar mark or whatever, I can do that. I already have most of that programmed into it, so I hit Apply. That always freaks me out when the bar shows up in the middle of nowhere. But it will go away.

OK, and there are-- and I hit cancel. I'm done with that command. And there, the rest of the bars have been placed-- the ones that were missing through here. So again, through smart layout of your parameters and whatnot, you can automate much of the process.

One last thing I'll show you here quick is this is great. This is concrete reinforced bridge design. What about steel bridges? The answer is yes.

Real quickly, what I'm going to do here is show you a couple of files. Here we have a cross frame. Here we have a production drawing of that cross frame used for fabrication, fully dimensioned.

I'm going to go back to-- here's my base bridge drawing. It's a crest vertical curve. Let's see what happens when we change that.

To speed things up here, because this would take about 10 minutes otherwise, I have a level of detail set that hides much of the content. So we're just going to leave behind two plate girders and one cross frame. OK, there we go. Zoom in on it a little bit.

Now I should mention when we were looking at it, the whole road has one 3% cross slope going across it. Let's say we want to change that to a normal crown. OK, so go back to the bridge base drawing. Take a look at my forms.

Here I have a deck slab configuration. I'm going to change it to minus 3% on the opposite side of the road. This takes a minute to calculate. Joe's getting nervous because I'm not leaving him any time to do his part of the presentation.

JOE BRENNER: He gets carried away with Inventor sometimes.

NICK SEMAN: Yeah, Inventor's good stuff.

JOE BRENNER: [LAUGHING]

NICK SEMAN: OK, where did we go here? And minus on that. Oops. Minus, OK. So we're done with that.

Go back to the beams. Nothing's changed yet. If I go up to Manage and I rebuild-- we have to go through two steps here, because there's so many layers of changes. We've got the girders, we've got connection plates attached to the girders, we've got gussets connected to the connection plates, and we've got structural members connected to the gussets.

So sometimes when you have multiple levels of depth like that, you have to go through a couple rebuilds. You can see down to lower right, it's telling you what it's doing. Now, I had 36 cross frames in there. It doesn't take 36 times as long to do this. It takes maybe twice as long to do it, but if I had them all turned on. I just didn't want to make you sit through that.

All the bolt holes line up. I don't have bolts in here. I wanted to put them in, but somebody doesn't think they're necessary. [CHUCKLING]

OK, any time now. OK, so what happened there is you can see this beam is now higher than this beam. However, this did not update.

So, fine. I say I accept it, and I will quick do another rebuild. This one doesn't take as long. Now you'll see the cross frame will snap in place.

Now, what did change? All the connection plates did. The flanges on the beams-- the beams themselves or the girders changed.

And while we're waiting for this to happen, you might say, OK, this is great. You can build a model of it. What can we do with this model now that you're done?

Well, obviously you can do a lot of stuff with it. You can analyze it. You can run simulations on it. You can also create your construction drawings from it. And what we're going to see here, as soon is this cross frame snaps into place, is the cross frame part drawing we looked at a minute ago, and the cross frame assembly drawing-- you'll see those are both automatically updated. I don't have to go tell those to update.

OK, there we go. You can see it snapped in place. Here is the cross frame part. Now it slopes the other direction. Here is the cross frame drawing, also sloping the other direction. All the dimensions have updated, and if there were any material changes, the build materials table would have updated as well.

That's a simple contract drawing. How about we take a look at something a little more complex, like pier drawings? These are entirely done in Inventor. They meet the requirements of the DOT that we prepared this for, and as Joe mentioned, these will actually be saved as a DWG brought into that other program, and we can turn in MicroStation DGNs. OK?

JOE BRENNER: Yeah. Very good. And just to highlight a fact, those are our fabrication level drawings. I mean, that's the kind of accuracy that we're getting down to. They could take that to the shop floor and go ahead and fabricate based on that. Can you-- oh, I guess we are back on here.

NICK SEMAN: Yep, you're back, so you can--

JOE BRENNER: I can come back here. All right, so what I'm going to do-- Nick showed you a little bit about how we do reinforcement in Inventor. What I'm going to do is show you an alternative approach in Revit. We did this. We found that modeling reinforcement was really a key component in our process.

We're not getting additional budgets here. We're doing this on traditional, or what we typically get for a budget. So we needed to look at, how do we push this over the edge in efficiency to offset some of these costs? Because again, reap the quality benefits on the back end? And reinforcement modeling is one thing that really pushed us over the edge.

So I'm going to go through this here and just show you some of the capabilities. This is a video just to save time, since Nick took it all up in the Inventor. Ooh, that's terrible. There we go.

So this is an abutment. So here we're just going into a section view. We've already added the reinforcement into our abutment monitor. You can see we have some J-bars in the footing. Some of those seismic ties, like Nick was showing in the pier. We have them in this footing as well.

What we're going to do is add another set and the front face horizontal bars here. So we can tell it we want a number four bar. We can tell it we want to have bars based on a maximum spacing of a foot. So we're going to go ahead and place this set.

We can change the limits after we place it, so I'm going to bring that up to just be in the stem here. And again, we told it that it's got to have a foot spacing-- maximum spacing. So we'll update the quantity of the bars needed. And also, we can give it the clearance requirements here so it knows not to place the bar any closer than what is required.

So here's an elevation with all the reinforcement there added. The next view is the same elevation, just with some settings changed. So now we're starting to look more like our typical drawing sheets, showing first and last bar.

So here we can also create some parametric annotations tags for rebar, based on what we've input. And again, one of the main things is the automation of scheduling. This is huge for us-- the ability to customize this.