Description
Key Learnings
- Learn Autodesk Construction Cloud basics, including file management, issue tracking, model sharing, and more.
- Gain insight into the best ways to use Autodesk Construction Cloud as a design review tool, as well as a data collection tool.
- Discover the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform's utility as it relates to bike path, roadway, and highway design.
Speaker
- Charles SandersonI'm Charles Sanderson, I work as a Transportation Designer and Drafter for VHB Inc. in Boston Massachusetts. For over 5 years now I've helped design, review and oversee the construction of, roadway, structural and transportation projects. A few years ago I became interested in custom automation and programming related to Civil 3D and AutoCAD. With the resources available through Autodesk and the wider internet, I've taught myself C#, .NET and Dynamo and have created a host of time saving applications and tools for my company. I'm by no means an expert programmer but my experience has taught me that it's not necessary to be one in order to help yourself and your company save time and make an increasingly better product. My hope is that I can teach others some of the basics I learned and help them avoid some of the pitfalls and trials I experienced when I started.
CHARLES SANDERSON: Hey, everyone, and welcome to the presentation. I want to thank you all for coming or viewing this right now. And really appreciate everyone who took the time out of their day to sign up and get involved in this. I had 113 people registered. And we'll see if 113 actually attend last day at AU. Understand how it goes. But I just really appreciate that. It was a big number, and I was initially a little nervous. A little terrified, actually, is probably a better word.
But after I got over that initial bout, I was humbled and honestly pretty reassured, just because I think like a lot of you, I may have thought that ACC was maybe just a construction tool. And maybe you didn't really completely see the utility of using it for infrastructure design. And part of my job recently has been figuring out the ins and outs and how it can be used for highway design. And the other part of my job has been convincing people that it's a worthwhile tool for highway design.
And I wanted to take some of the lessons that I've learned throughout that experience and maybe put them out for people that are trying to do the same at their companies. So without further ado, let's get into it. Now, Safe Harbor statement. Probably seen this a ton at AU so far, and there's one more time here. Basically, don't take anything that I say as a reason to buy this product or anything like that, or start using it. And anything that I talk about that might be coming in the future are really just hopes of mine.
Anyway, so like I said, I'm Charles Sanderson. I'm a transportation designer with VHB, Inc. We're a mid-sized, multi-disciplinary, I think 2,100 person firm all up and down the East Coast. We do everything from highway design to landscape architecture. Landscape design. Structures. Transit and rail. Environmental. A bunch of other things. I personally have been doing highway, roadway, and bike infrastructure design for about seven years now, from the initial concept information gathering phase to the actual DWG design, and then all the way out to construction site services. So it's been a great experience, and I'm excited to do more of it.
On top of that, I'm a model based design coach, which if you don't know what that means, you can watch or attend my colleague [INAUDIBLE] presentation shortly after mine. And again, on top of that, I do a lot of C Sharp, vb.net, Dynamo automation, and a lot of our CAD education and training. A lot of training and live demonstrations. So if I make any PowerPoint faux pas, I'm usually used to doing a more live demo stuff. But I'm going to do my best here.
So I wear a lot of hats. And on top of that, I've been working with Autodesk products since I was a freshman in high school. And I started out on AutoCAD LT, made my way up to Revit, and Venture from there. Use Fusion 360 all throughout college. And like I said, I'd been doing Civil 3D for about seven years now. So I really just have a well-versed-- yeah, just a well-versed history with Autodesk. And I've used that to great effect with figuring out exactly how ACC works. And it's been a great product so far. This is my third time at AU-- or will be my third time at AU. And it's my first time speaking. So just again, really appreciate you all coming to this presentation.
So today, what are we learning about? So we're learning about ACC's basics, including file management, issue tracking, model sharing, and more, and gain some insight into some of the best ways to use ACC as a design review tool, as well as a data collection tool. And then we're going to discover some of the platform's utility as it relates to bike path, roadway, and highway design.
Now, a little bit of an addendum up top. I'm realizing that this will be the last day of AU, and the third year that I've heard about ACC. And probably more than that for others. So some people might be a little basic-ed out. You might not necessarily need to learn how to place an issue down or things along those lines. So really, a lot of what I'm going to try to do with this and a lot of what I've been trying to do in general is reframing some of the functionalities of ACC, and some of the basics and the names. And just reframing how we look at them to maybe work more with our highway design plans.
ACC was an outgrowth of BIM 360 and a lot of Autodesk other construction tools. So like I said, up top, it might not seem at first as though this is the best tool to use for horizontal infrastructure design. But I've learned through the different projects I've been working on that it really is beneficial and is such a great thing, too, that I love using.
So yeah, we've been using ACC at our company for about two years now. And because of that, we haven't really finished a large highway project in ACC yet. Any highway engineers out here? Our projects take a long time. A lot longer than two years. Some of the stuff that I first designed when I started seven years ago is just now being built. So like I said, we haven't finished anything yet. We haven't finished a full project in ACC yet. Some things are being migrated over. We've got some on-call construction things working with some of our bigger clients in ACC. And starting out a lot of projects in our concept phase in ACC.
So when I first was selected for this presentation, I wanted to combine a lot of those things into one whole huge finished project and show everyone this is how a fully designed highway project will look. I made a bunch of fake DWGs and demo sheets, and took a bunch of actual photos out of Massachusetts Avenue and made a bunch of different issues and sent a lot of emails to myself and to coworkers to show all the correspondence stuff. And I even got back into Revit and made a boxy building, and you can definitely tell it's designed by a civil engineer.
But I was going through my initial dry run, and it took about an hour and a half. So talked to my mentor. Tried to reassess things. And what he told me was just, listen, you don't necessarily need to go through every piece of this. People have been hearing about ACC for a while, and will have heard a lot of it at this conference. So really just get into what is working for you with ACC. Why you like it. Why you recommend it to other people. And I went back to the drawing board.
One of the things that I've been learning over my past experience with ACC is that we're a multidisciplinary company, like I said, and a lot of the other teams that I've been working with are much more excited than our highway team is about using ACC. Our landscape development and landscape architecture and everyone else is pretty gung ho about it and has gone through and actually completed a lot of their short-term projects in ACC already.
So when I was redesigning a bit of this presentation, I thought, well, let's ask my highway team why they're a little bit reticent to go about this. Now, I got a lot of information that I expected-- or got a lot of responses that I expected at first. Like the questions I asked at the top, a lot of people were wondering, isn't that just for construction? Why would I need to use it? But some other things that were coming across that I didn't necessarily expect-- a lot of questions about files.
Isn't that just for working online? I thought I had to be in the browser. Or, wouldn't I have to download my files every time to keep using them? Or, every time I click on something in ACC, it opens up a web version. I just want to see what I need in Civil 3D and Bluebeam. And then, like I said, our projects take a lot longer than other disciplines. What if ACC isn't around for the long run?
Now I can't talk to tech company hype cycle stuff. But having worked in ACC for a bit now, I'm pretty confident that's going to be around for the long haul. It's not the metaverse. But it makes sense. People are a little bit worried. They want to be able to access their files now, and in the long haul. So one of the things that I've been trying to get across to people is that if all you need is your files, ACC and your company's internal server are pretty much going to be the same in a lot of ways and better in a lot of other ways.
Once the project is connected, accessing them is the same way through File Explorer like it always was. Or opening up your DWGs in Civil 3D through the browser there. It's really going to be pretty seamless and pretty much the same. Browse and open in the same way. And one of the points that I've been trying to make to get people on board initially is that at its most basic, you can think of as ACC an external hard drive.
Now I know that's a little reductionist, but it's a good way to look at it at its most basic. So if all you need is your files, the Desktop Connector is what you need. And like I said, we're not going to go into all of the intricacies of Desktop Connector. But as I'm putting up here, it really is that easy. You install it, select your projects, and then in a couple of seconds, all that stuff is readily accessible in File Explorer. It is such a seamless and easy to use tool that once that's all set up, I've seen people-- you transition pretty quickly and pretty easily.
And so really, it's a lot of that's operating the same. Well, the same and faster, as I'm going to show here. I decided to do a bit of a demonstration between opening up a file in ACC our internal server. So right now, I'm opening up an 89 megabyte beast of a [INAUDIBLE] surface through ACC and through the internal server. And just to show that I wasn't cheating and caching things beforehand, I started the ACC a little bit behind and loaded up that project.
So as you can see right now, Desktop connector is downloading from the cloud the same way that Civil 3D is downloading that DWG from your internal server. But you can see ACC is moving a lot faster. And now that it is actually loaded up and loaded up very quick, you can see that I'm going to close it out. And because it was cached on your computer, things are going to open up even quicker the second time.
And that's not just for DWGs and opening up individual DWGs. Reloading XREFs is faster. Syncing your data shortcuts is faster. Smoother. All that sort of stuff. I am getting less crashes and less lag time than ever. Now again, this is anecdotal and a very cherry picked example. One that I made especially hard for our internal server. But in general, as a self-professed CAD jockey that's in the DWGs every day, I can tell you one of the things I notice the most between-- I'm working in projects that are on ACC and on our internal server, and it's just pretty seamless how things open up in ACC. It's again, anecdotal, but I've noticed a massive difference.
And files are getting bigger. Things are getting more complicated. We're getting more and more data, and it's going to be pretty imperative that our stuff is all loading fast. Loading correctly. Loading the first time. That we're not losing work on saves. That we're able to coordinate between all the different places that all this different data is stored. And if this was the only benefit of ACC, I'd still be here talking about it. I would still be pushing for all my projects to be on ACC. But as we're going to get into, that's not the only thing.
So we've got our initial projects. We got our initial files loaded up in the cloud. Things are faster, easy to access, all the same ways as before. Just a little bit better. But what happens if you've got other projects and you want to connect them? What if you wanted to link them or path them together or bridge?
Now let's talk about ACC Bridge. Again, probably heard a lot about it already. Probably going to hear more about it come AU time. But I really like ACC Bridge. with a couple of small caveats. How do I know that ACC isn't always marketed with civil infrastructure in mind? Well, their main project connecting features named after one of the most quintessential pieces of civil design and construction.
I often work with our bridge team on bridge projects and I need their bridge files and their bridge DWGs and bridge PDFs and bridge, bridge, bridge. I actually have it written down that many times like I'm Jack Nicholson in The Shining. But with all that, as confusing as it can get, as unfortunate as the naming is, it's really still such a great feature. Now, could they have gone with Link or Connect or something like that? Yeah. But hey, I'm not a marketing guy.
Even with all that said, I love bridge. It's such a great feature. And one of the reasons that I love it and one of the reasons that I want to reframe how it's thought about a little bit is that the way that Bridge-- at least I've always seen it come across is that it's for talking to a bunch of different subcontractors and different companies outside of your own.
And while it's incredible for that, one of the ways that we are making the most use of it is just internal file sharing. Like I said, we're multidisciplinary. We've got a lot of different things going on. Some of our projects are intersecting with each other or collaborating. But they're in different file systems for different clients. Or we have projects starting under different contract numbers that then need to collaborate after the fact.
So in the past, we've done a couple of different things. And you let me know what you think is the easiest, fastest, and best way for this. Is it having XREF paths to multiple places in the network and having shortcuts within your files? XREFs going all over the place? Things that are orphaned and unloaded? Is it copying and pasting files from other disciplines and just really hoping and praying that people emailing you update their DWGs and that none of your layering breaks when you upload a new file? Or would it be choosing the exact files that you want to get sent to you, choosing exactly where they go, and having them update automatically? I know which one I'm choosing as we go forward.
Now again, I won't belabor this point. There are going to be much more in depth presentations on Bridge than what I'm going to go through right now. But I just wanted to convey really, honestly how easy it is to share these things. You just select the files you need, share in the same way you'd share outside links or with other project members. You select the name of the folder that you want it to be. So it can be in your own file system if you're working with someone who's working for the MBTA, and I need things in the MassDOT file structure. However it works out for you all, wherever you are.
But yeah, just select your project, select the target folder, select the files you want, write a nice little message, share it across, and all that stuff can be updated automatically. Now I should say that depending on the project, depending on your company, you might not want things to be automatically updated. So that'll have to be a conversation between your PMs and everyone else that is involved in the project. But it is pretty cool and pretty helpful that we even have the option for these to just automatically update like they were in XREF or something like that.
So things are coming together. We got a different project linked together. And I'm going to say linked from now on, at least for the rest of this presentation. So we got all these projects linked together. What else do we need? Often for us, we start needing data from the outside, especially if we're starting off a project. So one of the first things that I was doing as a young engineer was going out and taking a bunch of pictures.
Now the old way I used to do this was go out. Take a bunch of pictures. Probably the next week I'd be sorting through them, trying to figure out, OK, I took a picture of utility pole 121 there. And there's that bush in this next photo that I recognize. So this photo is definitely of the one catch basin that I need to be aware of and all that sort of stuff. And trying to make sure all of my plans and stuff were coordinated between that. And honestly, ACC has just made that a ton easier.
Now I know there are other geolocation softwares out there that have made geolocating your photos pretty easy. But I really enjoy how connected, and again, just easy it is on ACC. Even if you're not using the ACC app on a iPad or on your phone, really it's just taking photos with your phone, making sure they're geolocated, dragging, dropping, and then they're already on that map for you. It's really as easy as that. Just on the quintessential Google Maps map. And all the photos that you need will be right there.
Now speaking of Google Maps, I don't know about y'all, but whether it's from concept phase to the 100% submission that's due tomorrow, I'm pretty constantly on Google Maps for my projects, just trying to see if there's something that I'm not getting from the survey file, or just trying to get the correct disposition of something. But if you're in Google Maps all the time, you'll know that often things aren't updated to exactly what they are.
You're looking at right now at Mass Ave in Cambridge, which is one of the most busy thoroughfares in the greater Boston area. And that hasn't been updated since 2020. I know for a fact that that street has been worked on since. You got a separated bike lane there now. And let's say we're doing a proposal. It's going to be pretty time-consuming and honestly pretty expensive to send a survey team out there for a project we might not get. Or if it's early in a project, we might not have the time.
But you know what is easy and time efficient and not expensive? Sending out this guy with a GoPro strapped to his head to ride up and down the corridor and make yourself your own little Google Maps. So this is something I discovered that-- we'll get more into the data visualization side of things after the fact. But I didn't know that I could upload geolocated panorama photos to the map in ACC and essentially make that photos tab a lot like my own personal Google Maps. And it's been such a godsend for some of these places that don't have all that info updated.
And like I was saying, it was so easy. This was about an hour of me riding up once, riding back down, making sure everything was good to go, and then uploading all those into the cloud. And I can look at this whenever I need if I need to figure out exactly what's going on with the drainage right there, or if I need to say, hey, what kind of sign is this? or something like that. So easy to just access that and have it viewable in the browser, but viewable in other places as well.
So we've actually been developing a tool with Autodesk to bring some of that information from the browser down into our actual DWGs. What you're looking at right now is a little bit of a-- wish I could actually show you in Civil 3D itself, but it's a tool that we've helped develop with Autodesk to-- sorry-- create an ACC Connector Tool to bring some of that information down. So we've got our projects up top there, and different issues which we'll get into in a second.
And then our photos. We can actually select which photos we want. Bring them in as a hyperlinked block just exactly where they need to be in our DWGs. And from there we can just click on them and then be brought to that exact photo. And it just allows for more connectivity and linkage between the info that's viewable in our browser or the app, and then bring that down into the actual place that I'm doing the work into our DWGs.
So we're going forward. Got our projects, got our projects linked, and now we're starting to get some of that outside information. We got our pictures. Our geolocation. So what might be the best way to start connecting more of this data to get it all linked together? And some of you may be surprised, but the best way that I've found for that is with Issues.
Now, if you like me, I thought that Issues were kind of just for punch lists. I did a year working at a general contractor before I started working for VHB, and punch lists were a huge thing. And that's how I've always seen Issues portrayed as. It's just this way to make a list of different problems that were either arising in the plans or problems that arose during construction, and categorize them. And it's great for that, but there's a lot of other things that I can do.
As I've started using them more, I realized, well yeah, I've heard about attaching photos to pictures. That's pretty cool. That's a great way to have that information stored. And then from there, it's like, oh yeah, geolocation. Issues are a great way to store exactly where this problem is in my project. And then from there, you can bring it into the sheets. Have all that information accessible from this place and this place and this place, and then be able to click on it in the sheets that I'm preparing.
From there also, cool, people can also be linked to this. I can select different things or different project members and have them connected to this thing as well. And then from there, pretty much everything else in your project can be linked through Issues. So really, again, in the spirit of reframing a lot of these things from the more construction-focused lens to just a general sort of lens, my really only issue with Issues is the name. Although in this case, I can't really think of a better one. But, hey.
One of the best pieces of advice that I got during college was-- it was during my MATLAB class. And the professor, she was going over with-- got a class of a hundred civil engineers, a lot of whom had never coded before-- just the difference between different coding languages. And she said that the main two things that each coding language does is how it stores information and how you access that information. And I think that applies here because there's so many different ways that information is stored within ACC. And one of the best ways to connect all of that and access them is with Issues here.
Now I have a little bit of an example. When I was first going through these, when I was first getting into Issues, I actually started out in a pretty small project. It was a bike path repaving project that I was doing out in Western Mass. And I really wanted to use ACC for this project. We've been talking about it. We've been trying to figure out the best way to utilize it. And I just was like, it's going to be this one.
So sat down with my PM, sat down with the environmental engineer we're going to be working with, and we just started brainstorming. All right, here are the tools. How do we use them? And my environmental engineer brought up to me-- he's like, well, I'm doing a tree inventory. I really need just a list of the different sized trees and all available information about them. And I thought, OK. Well, I've been told that Issues are a great way to make a punch list, so why don't I start looking into that?
And I've got my-- sorry. I started going into the Issues and making my own custom ones. And I realized, OK, cool. I can make my sub ones there. So I've got trees under 6 inches and trees from 6 to 12 inches, and going on up then. So I made those. And then I go out in the field with the iPad and I'm like, cool. I can actually plop this pin exactly where I need it. And awesome, I can start taking photos and have that all attached there.
And it just really started to come together through that project that this tool, which I thought was just to make a list of things that were going wrong, was actually a great way to have all of the other info I had sorted together, put together in a way that was readily accessible and readily viewable. All of that became a sorted list in this tree inventory that my environmental engineer needed.
And one of the biggest things with this was, and one of the reasons I bring up this project is that this ended up being a $400,000 repaving job, which in the grand scheme of a lot of highway projects, that's pretty small. And again, in the spirit of rephrasing a bit of how ACC is viewed, especially within the highway community of things-- is that I'd always gotten the impression that ACC was for these massive, tens of millions of dollars site projects where you're coordinating with a dozen different subcontractors and you have all these different submittals and RFIs and stuff like that.
So I was a little reticent to try it with something like this. But in reality, yeah, I only used Photos and Issues part of ACC to make this easier. Well, I also had all my DWGs and stuff, but we were able to utilize those two things, get them into our sheet views quicker, see the problem areas that we have, and estimate this much faster than we used to be able to. This is something that would have taken, I don't know, maybe two weeks before of me in the field coordinating with our environmental engineer. Him having to go back out and fix all the mistakes that I made.
Now, this was a day and a half of me with the iPad walking up and down these eight miles, getting a list of every tree that was causing a crack in this thing and having all the information readily accessible. Something that was probably, again, two weeks in the field, one week of putting all together-- we finished it in a week. We made this, again, admittedly small project even faster. Got it in on time.
And so I think one of the biggest things that I'm trying to get across is that you don't necessarily need to utilize every aspect of ACC to make it a worthwhile thing. If you're just using one or two, or even just for storing your files, it is incredibly helpful. So as we're going on, cool. We've got our project. We've got our main project and all of our files. We got things linked. We're starting to get photos and geolocation and connecting all that stuff with issues.
And I'm sorry this is getting a little muddled. I'm not a graphic designer. But I make good corridors, though. They're pretty. But as we're going on, one of the last things that I want to bring up is just the data visualization side of ACC, and just how helpful that's been with showing the design intent that I'm making, either internally or with the public, or aiding the design itself.
So one of the biggest things about our industry is that-- and I know that all construction projects are liable to public scrutiny to a certain degree. But I don't know how much other projects can be derailed after three years of work because you couldn't explain to the public what exactly was going on in your plan set. And we have so many incredibly cool tools these days to show you what our design intent is. It's just not often easy to get that out to everyone.
Like I said, this beyond typical stuff is great. And sharing a shared InfraWorks view is incredible. But they don't really mean much if you can't disseminate them to the people that need them. But with ACC, you can have all of those files loaded up into a single [INAUDIBLE] shared space. Share out links before a public meeting. People can walk through. Or just even during a public meeting itself, being able to bring up this stuff all within one space. Not have to have a bunch of different programs to show a video and then do a little site walk through on your model that you created.
So it's really cool-- just the fact that we'll be able to present this all in one spot, but then also send out links so that people will be able to view them without needing the programs themselves. And getting more into that, I think the thing that's been the most crucial and the most helpful for me is just being able to view what you need when you need it.
Because the Data Viewer is such an impressive tool just for the fact that I can either do the more traditional or more marketed stuff that I've seen about ACC, which is zooming around my drawings and looking for utility conflicts and looking at different things like that, or just getting a point cloud. And I think that gets to another point that I love about ACC-- is that I was looking through the entire list of all the viewable files.
There are 83 different types of-- sorry, there are 83 different types of viewable 2D and 3D file types that can be viewed within the Data Viewer of ACC. Like I said before, projects are getting more complicated. We're getting more data from more different places. And I hadn't run across a point cloud before, and now I know that I can download and use ReCap. But I don't have ReCap. But there's a solid chance I might need to look at a point cloud, or someone else might need to look at a point cloud.
And I've just found that when I've had these things that I know have viewable, pertinent, visualizable data, I can honestly just throw them into ACC. And nine times out of 10, I'm going to be able to get the information I need just because that Data Viewer is so robust. And I wanted to throw up a list of all the things just to impress upon you how robust all this was, but I realized that's probably going to be outdated maybe one time that I give this actual presentation at AU.
So it's incredible how much this tool has been changing, and how versatile it already is. And like I said, we might just need to reframe a little bit of how we're viewing ACC within the highway community, thinking about it not as this construction tool, but as this multi-purpose go-to thing for anything that we need, whether it be our initial site photos or a site walkthrough or just a great place to store our files and look at them the way that we need to when we need to.
So to wrap up really quickly, ACC. Initially, great foundation. Great place to store your files. And because of that, also it's a great place to link different projects and different files together. From there, we're getting all of our different site info, whether it's photos, geolocation, all that sort of stuff. We're using our Issues to link them together. And then because of the Data Viewer, we can bring in so much more info. Utilize it in different ways that we haven't been able to before.
And then from there, we're able to display that to the rest of the world-- or, display that either internally to make our design lives easier or display it to the world so that I don't have another bike path shut down at the 11th hour because I couldn't really explain it at a town meeting. But anyway, I really appreciate you all coming today. And I really appreciate you all taking the time out of your schedules to look at this video or come to my actual presentation.
And feel free to contact me. Like I said at the top, I'm a bit more of an in-person demonstrator. So if you want me to run through some of the things, some of the different ways that I've done this, my email is up in that first slide. Please feel free to contact me. I love talking about all this stuff. And have a nice day. And I hope to see you all at AU or some other time in the future. Thanks.