The Unlikely Marriage of Horizontal and Vertical Construction in InfraWorks 2017

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Well, thank you, guys. I really appreciate everybody coming out. Last session of the day on Thursday of AU after party night. We appreciate you guys coming out and hopefully you'll take away a few things from this presentation at least to make it worthwhile.

So I'm Kris Lengieza. I'm the VP of opex at Stiles Construction down in Fort Lauderdale. We're a general contractor, owner, builder, developer-- we do a little bit of everything. Anything from finding you a piece of dirt to buy all the way to tear that building down 20 years later and sell that piece of dirt. Today with me I've got Brian and I'll let him introduce himself.

BRIAN SMITH: I have a unique background from the civil side, and mainly heavy civil, so water, wastewater, airports, roads. But a director of technology is where I come from. So I love scanning UAVs and most importantly, data. How do we take all of this data and find programs like InfraWorks to be able to make complicated data sets built together?

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So if you didn't know, this is a class. We're going to talk about InfraWorks and bring in all kinds of different data sets into it and all the different use cases we can do with it. So I'm not going to read the class description, but it's an InfraWorks class. So if you thought it was going to be something else, I won't be offended if you go ahead and leave.

So Brian and I met a few years ago at AU. Actually, we figured out it's been seven years since we met at AU. Ironically, we met in a class called BIM and Beers. So that probably doesn't shock you much if you know Brian or I. But what we realized is that even though we had a very stark difference in our backgrounds, I'm coming from the vertical side of things, building, construction, and Brian coming from the horizontal things, there was a ton of overlap.

Brian was doing some pretty amazing things with UAVs at the time-- still is, but was doing some really cool things that I couldn't wait to learn about and try and apply to the vertical side of things. And I think I was doing some things with some of the vertical work that he wanted to take back and learn about for his firm at the time.

And I think one of the interesting things that we bonded over was I introduced InfraWorks to Brian. He was a Civil 3D guy and never really used InfraWorks. And I was like, oh, well, I love to do pipe networks and roads and stuff in InfraWorks because it's just easy and it makes this great canvas for our projects-- to drop our vertical projects in it. And then we started working on some projects together.

BRIAN SMITH: Yeah. Who's used InfraWorks here? Oh, good. OK. Who used InfraWorks three years ago? Oh.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: A much smaller--

BRIAN SMITH: And who actually used it? Not just opened it or played with it, but actually used it three years ago. That's impressive, actually. And what we're trying to show is that-- so I did forget real quick that my current position is with product manager for Multivista for Emerging Technologies and also Leica. They're owned by a company called Hexagon.

So I have this hybrid role where I get to play with the software and the hardware for solutions. So this is a use case of solutions and then employing them and the opportunity within Stiles Construction.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So one more poll question. How many people are vertical folks doing vertical buildings and what not? OK. So a smaller crowd. And then a lot more of you are horizontal Civil guys. All right. Cool. I like it. So we had this unique opportunity. Brian and I were talking about coming up with an idea to present at AU. And I said, man, I got these three key major projects that our firm's going to build. They're literally on the block next to my office in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

There's just so much going on with these projects, I feel like I need to have a model of the city and everything that's happening around it so that I can coordinate what's going on. We've got some new roundabouts that are going to be happening, we've got road closures, we've got all kinds of buildings that we have to coordinate logistics with and traffic. So I said, let's build this massive InfraWorks model of the downtown Las Olas corridor of Fort Lauderdale and use it for our logistics. And let's do a case study on it.

Let's try and figure out all the different data sets that we could go ahead and bring in here. So Brian and I started talking about it and we were like, cool. So we started collecting photos, we started collecting laser scan data, we started doing MOT plans and logistics plans. And you'll see as we tell this story that we overlaid all of this and InfraWorks was our tool for the storytelling on this.

So some of the use cases which I've already mentioned that we focused on-- site logistics plans-- a great tool for figuring out how you're going to do MOT planning, where you're going to put your trailers, where parking is going to be, all kinds of things, especially in these dense downtown cities, there's a lot of things that are happening there. Site planning and traffic control, and then some early civil development.

So how are we going to plan this work? Brian could talk a lot more about some of the things he did with some of the Civil elements on this project. So if you came to AU last year, you may have come to my class. I did a class all about using InfraWorks for logistics plans. And one of the things I love about InfraWorks is how easy it is to use. I am not a Civil guy, but I can build cities and streets and underground very quickly and easy in InfraWorks, and then use them as a stage to tell a story.

So this is an example of one of the logistics plans we did for a downtown Del Rey project. You can see there's a lot of existing buildings. Most of them pretty short, but it was a pretty busy thoroughfare. So we had a lot of information that we had to figure out with flag men and turning lanes and where the traffic was going to be, where the signage was going to be. And by using this tool to create more of an immersive environment, it allowed our clients to really understand how they were going to be affecting the neighborhood, who they were going to have to get air rights from in order to fly cranes over, and a lot of different information that they may not have actually thought.

This was done actually during a pre-construction effort and actually helped us win this project. And some of the things that you don't think about that actually will matter to an owner is, what is this project going to look like from the street? So one of the things we did was these snapshots of identifying even what the screening was going to look like, things like that. And what was great about it was on our first iteration, the owner goes-- because we had our logo all over the screening on the outside, of course. I'm going to get some good branding out of this.

And they're like, no, no, no, we want to put the iPic logo, we want to put Coming Soon. So the fact that they could visually see that and we didn't have to go buy all this netting and screening and put it up, and then realize, hey, guys, we need you to tear that down, we'd much rather do this, was a big time saver. And I think they felt pretty engaged and pretty involved in it, as well.

BRIAN SMITH: And one thing I wanted to add to this is the effort and time that Kris's team put into this. The majority of this is super nuts. A lot of it is coming from the raw InfraWorks database. And if anybody heard about the announcement yesterday with ESRI. This is where I get super excited about the opportunities with InfraWorks. Because now we are going to be able to tap into some very in-depth data that we can pull from ESRI to even make more precise and better models faster.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah. And what's really cool from a development perspective from our development group is being able to overlay a lot of that ESRI information onto these maps and looking at potential project locations. So in that downtown Fort Lauderdale, when we get back to it, I'll point out an area. There's a new planned street car. We do overlays of things like all existing and new permits that are in the city to understand what else is going to be built around an area.

It really gives us an idea of, is this a good site for us to purchase? Is this a good site for us to build an apartment tower on it? Who else is planning to build around us? So being able to tap into even more of that ESRI data and overlay it with things like population data and age densities and things like that in an area, I think, are going to open up an entirely new way of looking at geography to us in a 3D BIM environment.

So as we talk about site planning, one of the unique things about this project is it's on what's called the New River, which is a river that runs through downtown Fort Lauderdale. The biggest boat show in the United States happens on this once a year. So this whole area gets completely overrun with tourists, with people looking to buy yachts all the way down to 10-foot Jon Buoy boats.

But what was interesting was, we have this drawbridge that's right next to our project and I was concerned about two different things about this drawbridge. One, what were the sight lines going to be like on the project as we looked out of windows of units that were selling at this downtown with this drawbridge? Are some people are going to be looking right into the side of this thing? And two, we're slammed for space.

So we've got to figure out a place to put trailers and parking and stuff on site. So we wanted to see if we can actually fit some of the trailers underneath the bridge and be able to utilize that space more efficiently and rent it from the city so that we could go ahead and do that. So we went out and we captured scanned data. You can see the Leica symbols in there. We did some scanning with the P60 scanner.

We also had Multivista come out and capture site photography of the entire area. So when you see those red arrows, that designates a photo that was taken at that location. So we're overlaying all of that data on here so that when we're doing the site planning we can really see what the real life condition is like at this location.

BRIAN SMITH: And with that site planning, now we're starting to involve not just the owner or maybe the city, but we're getting the involvement of actually all the other stakeholders that are involved with this process. So the foreman, all of the actual construction team from the PM down. And when we start to engage them in a non-two dimensional format, it really gets the ideas going of how is this actually going to work.

Actually, scroll back-- well, I guess this is part of that story. So you see we tucked this job trailer under here. We weren't actually sure if we could do this. And Kris actually-- this was our problem was, well, other than taking a tape measure or actually going out on site, how do we know that we can do this? But we're collecting all this data already.

So scroll to that next picture. This is where you start to integrate all these different sets that you can use for design, but you can also use it for site planning. And what we've done is-- and we'll show you this in a live demo assuming our internet is OK. What we've done is embedded links within InfraWorks that will pop up TruView. Anybody heard of Leica TruView? So it's very powerful. It's a point cloud program.

So what you're actually looking at is a pop-up of TruView. So while you're in InfraWorks, you can actually take accurate point cloud measurements without having to bring in that point cloud data. So you're looking at the bridge right there where that box is and you're also looking at the bridge in our InfraWorks model. So that begins to give you some real true analysis. Because InfraWorks is close and it's a good graphical representation, but we all know that scan data truly gives you that finite measurement of the existing conditions in the field.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So here's just a little bit deeper on that and being able to double click and expand that out into an entire viewer web browser if you wanted to go and do a lot more interaction with it. What we were showing before is just hovering over it. It opens up right in the quick tooltip. So you don't have to click on it, don't have to navigate to it. And you can actually interact with it, just like you would in the web. So it's great for web pages, it's great for Leica TruView. There's a million different possibilities that you can go ahead and do this with an overlay lots of really good embedded HTML information right onto your project.

So we did a very similar thing with the photos from Multivista. One of the great things about that was they go out, they take all these photos. They're already located on a map, so now we have geolocation of all these photos and direction. They have a nice plug-in that goes into Revit to bring over all of the locations and directions of all the photos and the hyperlinks. And then we overlay that right on top of InfraWorks. So each one of these little arrows with its direction is the same thing. When you hover over it, it takes you to a preview of that photo.

If you wanted to dive in deeper, you could double click on it and it would open a browser window and you could comment on that photo, you could provide additional information to that, as well.

BRIAN SMITH: And what's unique about this is not that we're coming up with new tools to be able to do this. We're using one common source for the entire project team to look at and to be able to use these more intricate tools that maybe aren't available to a planner or anybody on the construction team that needs to be able to get different information out of it. And these don't live in the InfraWorks model. InfraWorks is a database where you're pulling information into it.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So a little bit more information. This is the bridge I was talking about. Just spinning around here. We started to overlay some of the CAD files and some of the information that we had from the Civil design on top of here to get some concept. We want to take a look at where the piles and the pile layout was. That was really interesting to us, because when we get pile plans, a lot of the time as a general contractor, there's no context. We don't see it over the existing parking lot or what's maybe there already.

This gave us the ability to plan where we were actually going to start piling on this project. Did we need to clear an entire area out? Was there some subsurface drainage that had to be ripped out? Were there trees in the way? Could we start on a different side for the site? So now that we could see this overlaid right onto the map world, we could understand much better what we were dealing with on the project.

BRIAN SMITH: And part of that is incorporating our works that we do within Civil 3D, whether it's at the basic planning level or all the way through final design. There now is a very seamless plug-in to transfer your Civil 3D information into InfraWorks. But what's great about it is even if you're just looking at it from a conceptual standpoint-- and this is an example of just a 2D, flat drawing-- you can still overlay that on top of the InfraWorks model itself.

So it could be a full blown Civil 3D roadmap network with your alignment and your vertical profile. It'll pull all of that into InfraWorks and it's very, very powerful. And this is an instance where you can even just bring in that simple 2D DWG that links to it. And again, what's great when you're linking these is it's a link. So as this updates and changes, so does the actual InfraWorks model.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So here it is, that same Civil 3D layout that's been overlaid right on top of InfraWorks there. So like Brian said, we didn't go out and collect all the profile data of the existing road. But what we really wanted to see is what the new road and how we were going to rework things was going to look. And really the area of focus for us was-- and we didn't do a good job of taking the right screenshot here, but in the top left-hand corner if you see up here, there's a whole roundabout that's being reworked in that area.

So that was really what we were focusing on when we're using this model is, what are we doing around this roundabout? How are we going to redirect traffic? Because people do still come and drive down this road to access the water and there's a whole bunch of office buildings down the other end of the street. So they're constantly coming through this space. It's not a main thoroughfare, but we couldn't just shut it down. We had to be able to come up with a plan of how we were going to build that and whether it be in pieces and parts, build half of the road or shut down over a weekend or what we were going to do.

Plus there's an active office building, which is right here that you see. We actually own the office building and so there's nothing worse than going into a building manager who works for the same company as you do and tell them that, hey, we're going to have to close the exit of your building for a few hours to be able to pave this. They're not real happy. They're like, wait a minute, you can't do that to us. And it's hard to say no. So we had to come up with plans before we even went to them and brought that up to be able to do that. Yeah, David?

AUDIENCE: Do you sync the locations of all these? [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: No. So we actually used some survey points that we brought him in with so that they aligned appropriately for us. The Civil 3D stuff is pretty easily-- usually in some sort of estate planning coordinates that we can bring that right into InfraWorks.

BRIAN SMITH: Civil 3D-- we're just talking translations of-- it works very, very well. Same with point cloud data, assuming that you're using some sort of control or a target when you're bringing that in. What we're really talking about is figuring out our risks and analyzing our risks. But when you're able to visualize and see it and prove not just to yourself but to the people that are actually going to be performing these closures or talking to the people that these are affecting, they can actually see that this impact isn't going to completely shut them down or that you've looked at other opportunities.

Because that's the other thing-- well, couldn't you do something different? Yes, we could, but let me show you why we came up with this decision. And it's a great talking point, because it's not a 2D picture. And we'll go back to the live demo here in a minute.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah. So the great thing about InfraWorks is once I'm in this, I can start pulling measurements if I need to. This is just an example. But if we wanted to know how far those trees were back, do we actually need to pull them out right away? Could they stay? Could they be relocated? Some of these trees on this site are actually planned to be relocated, not actually demoed and removed. So where are we going to put them?

So we can start taking measurements to key site elements on the project and communicate that with the team as we're planning the work.

BRIAN SMITH: And just back to the initial concepts of planning, using your vertical profiles, your road sections, starting that initial concept design in InfraWorks for Civil is really powerful now. You can change your side slopes, you can change your walls, you can change your barriers, you can change your lane widths. There's so many now different properties that you can be adding into your initial design concepts for InfraWorks, but it doesn't go to waste.

And that's what's really, I think, important here, is that this now can export and translate straight into Civil 3D. So as you're planning your concept and you get that approval, then you can go through and refine that and actually begin to make those plans in production.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So let's talk a little bit about importing all these data sets. So we've talked about bringing in things like the Leica databases, the point clouds. We've brought in 3D models and I'm about to show some examples of that. We had some 3D models of these projects that were in Revit, so we wanted to dump those right in. All kinds of database files, information about the project-- that's how we brought in most of that Multivista data and all those links, was through just some database files. Web links-- being able to hover over and see those pop-up windows that bring your right to a web viewer. And then GIS data.

So 3D models in Revit are pretty simple to bring in. You can actually direct import them using the Revit importer. There's also some good practices-- sometimes it's better to actually to go to maybe an FBX. Depending on what you're trying to do with materials, you might want to do some work on that in 3ds Max or something like that before you bring it into InfraWorks. But as these buildings stand alone and we look at them, they lack the context of what's around them.

So looking at them in Revit, even the one on the left that somewhat has some streets, it doesn't really tell the whole story of what's happening here. So when we bring those in and we drop those on top of this city block, you can see how congested it is, you can see all the things that are happening around. And one of the things that we had actually planned to do on this project-- Brian and I when we were working on this, was to fly this with some drone imagery, to fly a drone and bring that new orthographic map over the top of it.

The problem is, if you'll notice, there's a helipad over here. So we had a little bit of trouble getting some clearance in time to collect the data that we needed to. But it's definitely something that we needed to consider as we were planning this project. And it's been a really interesting conversation, especially in views like this as we've been planning things like crane placement on this project. Because those crane swings get awfully darn close to where that helipad is. So getting air rights to fly over a parking garage that also has a helipad on it is not exactly the easiest thing to do.

And so we're having a lot of conversations-- the county actually owns this parking garage here, so we're having a lot of conversations with them. But you really start to now get the concept of exactly how close to the road some of these things are, how really stacked up on top of each other these projects are, and how much coordination is going to need to go into things like deliveries and staging. And where people are going to park is a whole other problem that we're dealing with.

BRIAN SMITH: And diving into more of the devil of the details, what is the data? So we all know that the InfraWorks is pretty close, it's GIS, so it's pulling that data set out. But when we were on site, we said, well, how much can we do? And to give a little bit of background, too, Kris's company has built how many buildings already in this area?

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Oh, like 17 buildings within about a six block radius.

BRIAN SMITH: And in five years, how much construction are you guys going to be doing?

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah. So there are seven to nine projects planned to happen over the next three years in this six block radius. So four of them are ours and we wanted to have as much information about what was happening in this space as we possibly could. So Brian and I slapped on our pedometers and he strapped on the Leica backpack and we went for a walk.

BRIAN SMITH: So who's seeing the Pegasus Backpack? It looks like a Ghostbusters-- it's honestly-- and when you're walking through the city, people are like, what the heck is that guy doing? I've had people say, are you taking pictures of me? Are you are you taking the pictures of my license plates? But anyways, we did nine miles of data collection with the backpack in about 3 and 1/2 hours. It was only about 90 degrees, so--

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, it was cool.

BRIAN SMITH: It was a little warm.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, it wasn't too bad.

BRIAN SMITH: Just a little warm.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: That's cool for us. 90 degrees is good in--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah.

BRIAN SMITH: But what was really impressive is the fact that we were able to then take that really high res, very complicated data set that we collected using the mobile backpack and incorporate it also with some static laser scanning of the bridge that we really needed to make sure that wasn't going to be moving and monitoring, but also use that data set in a non-detailed format. So you don't have to be a point cloud expert to be able to get the benefit of the data that we collected.

So we're looking at this not just from the engineer's perspective, we're looking at this from the superintendent's perspective, giving them the tools to be able to use and access this data. This is TruView, which is a cloud-based viewing application. And again, once we start hosting things in the clouds, all's we're talking about is linking data to places in our model. It's just helping people get to that data set faster than going through-- or maybe even a lot of corporations have this, where it's rat holed in the project file and nobody knows because it's so buried that you're never going to find these data sets. But go ahead.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, one of the biggest problems that I always have with point cloud files is they're so big. They live either on a server or on a backup hard drive somewhere and most of your project team never ends up using them. So we wanted to find a better way for our team members to actually use this. So with the ability to put this into TruView, which is web-based, and have access to this information, and then have a relatively easy tool-- and we'll show you how we also published this InfraWorks model to the web so that someone just with the web address could get on it and then get access directly to these scan locations right from that web viewer. No need to even have InfraWorks installed on your machine.

So here's a little bit more of the scan data that came from that backpack. And I'll let Brian talk a little bit more about this process.

BRIAN SMITH: And really, mobile mapping is just using the GPS signal and also the IMU within the backpack. It's honestly an old method, but using the new tracking and the GPS, the accuracy we're getting is about 5 centimetres. So this is a sample data set of heading back under that bridge. It picks up everything from telephone lines to curb cuts to even visually, you can actually see the core striping down the middle of the road.

But the impact here is that we can start to do our initial planning. And if we need to come back in, which we did, and actually scan the bridge with the high res scanner, we can then overlay that data set, as well.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: And to be honest with you, as good as the data came with the backpack, we probably could've gotten away with just that data set. But this is for AU, so we ratcheted it up a bit and brought out the biggest, baddest scanner we could get our hands on and scanned that bridge. And you'll see how detailed that got. We got some buildings in downtown Fort Lauderdale that are about a half a mile away. So that was interesting.

BRIAN SMITH: There was a test one, it just was released today officially, it was 1 kilometer range. So if anybody's interested in scanning at 1 kilometer, Leica can do that for you. Now, breaking it back down into the actual details, we can look at this from this big picture perspective, but we can also break this down into Cyclone and use these same data sets and extract them. So it's back down to your personal level of what you want to look at.

This is that parking garage and you can actually see the different floor beams and the elevations, as well as the roadway. So you can certainly depict your roadway profile out of this, as well, if you're going to do RoadX or whatever it might be. But the advantage is that at the macro level, you have that opportunity to extract that information for the civil engineer, the structural engineer, whoever might need that. And again, we're just talking about using that same data set in multiple ways versus that one guy owning that data set and nobody ever else seeing it.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So a little more information from the backpack, but now taking a little bit different approach for it. So maybe Cyclone or TruView aren't your thing, so we brought these into ReCap, as well. And the reason that I wanted to bring them in to ReCap is I wanted to do some cleanup. I wanted to actually go ahead and siphon off some of this data, clean off the things that I didn't need to, make a very easy, manageable set of data that I could then share with others. So that's what I'm comfortable with. I'm a ReCap guy, so I went ahead and started siphoning off a little bit of this information so I could share it with my team members in what I felt was a very manageable size and chunk.

So back to-- what we did is we then took those scanned locations which we have, the GPS locations of all of those, and translated those so that we could place these markers right onto our InfraWorks map. And then there's two ways to actually create a link to something in InfraWorks. You can just use the hyperlink and put a link in there, which, if you're in a view only mode, if you double click on it, it'll actually open a web page with it.

But if you actually go into the tooltip, you can actually embed an HTML link in there and even do some work with the HTML on it, so that when you hover over it, you don't even have to double click and go out of the software. It'll actually open up a viewer right in here that will allow you to manipulate, look through that information, and interact with it just like it was a web page. So when we found this, we felt that this was a really great way not just for the scan data and not just for the photos, not just for web pages, which you'll see examples of later, but really tagging information so that when someone was in here just hovering over it and being able to get that information quickly without having to go somewhere else.

The other thing that we learned is as we publish these models up to the InfraWorks 360 cloud so that people could have access to them on the internet, all these links were also there, as well. So it gave you good information. As you come up with the little pins, which we'll show you later, each of them had a link that was able for you to go ahead and dive in and access. Now, the one thing that they seem to need to fix on that is when you hover over it, it gives you the link, but it won't let you double click on it. You have to right click and go to URL.

BRIAN SMITH: So this is showing, again, that incorporating within TruView that it does gobble up point clouds. It does very good at reading RCPs. It, again, dedensifies it just a little bit, but we're not trying to build a Revit model off of this. We're quickly trying to get some spatial reference. You want to give a back story real quick on--

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, so about a block away from those two projects, we had an existing project that we wanted to go scan. And we decided to use the BLK360, which is a good scanner. We did a lot of indoor scanning and some outdoor scanning of this. But what was interesting about this project was it's an existing three-story building that we were ripping the entire skin off the outside of it. So we were in the process of ripping that skin off and exposing the entire thing, but we're going to have to go back and fit it out completely. There's some new structural elements that need to go on a whole new glazing system.

So we wanted to scan it to have information about attachment points, make sure things were going to work. So we scanned it while we were out there, figured, hey, why not? Let's toss this into InfraWorks, as well, and see how InfraWorks handles this data set of the point cloud. And one of the things that we learned is, like Brian said, it does dedensify it slightly, but it really actually is pretty swift in movement, not a lot of reloading time. So I think it's positioned really well to handle these big point cloud files.

So if you do a lot of scanning of an entire city block or something like that, InfraWorks doesn't choke on that. It handles it very, very well. Whereas some other people may have a little bit of trouble dealing with that big data set just in the scanning software, the way that it handles those point cloud files is pretty good.

BRIAN SMITH: And we needed some pretty decent accuracy on this. It looks a little better on the screen than it does there. But again, it's a little bit different of a project. This time we're taking the skin off. Most of time when you're doing renos, you're keeping the outside and you're getting rid of everything on the inside. So this was a little bit different. But we needed to know exactly the ceiling heights-- and go to the next one-- and also the columns and where they're at. So each one of those points now is in the real world and in the right location.

So even from a rough planning perspective, you know where these things are at. The surveyor can actually go back and use this data set, as well, in conjunction with it.

We did all of this-- I think that was probably-- what? 25 scans, maybe?

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, 25 or 30 scans.

BRIAN SMITH: 30 scans. With the BLK360. I don't know if anybody's seen that yet, but it takes about 2 and 1/2 minutes per scan. Pretty high res acc and definitely it's a 3 mil accuracy.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So I realize that there's really no way to show a database really well in a presentation. But what I wanted to show here was all the photos that we had Multivista take. We used Dynamo, extracted their locations, xyz coordinates and the hyperlinks that were already embedded into them in Revit to a database file. And then we were able to take that database file and with a little slight bit of manipulation, load that into InfraWorks, which basically put a point of interest at every one of our locations of the photo. And then we were able to attach the hyperlink to it, as well.

So it's a little bit of a process and Brian's now working on automating this process, so I think that'll be really good. It's a really nice tool. And you can do this with any data set. That's really the point that we wanted to get across. So if you have hundreds of photos or you have lots of different points that you need to put into InfraWorks, you can go ahead and do this. And this was just brought out to a CSV file. And then we had to change the file format of it to be able to actually import into InfraWorks, which is a great BIM on the Rocks-- or I think they call it something different now-- but blog post about how to do this and it walks you through basically all the details on what you need to do to actually import this data into InfraWorks.

So the other thing is that we're a developer, we're trying to sell buildings and market things, so we wanted to start to tie other information in here, such as web pages. This was a leasing page for this new tower that we were building in the middle. So we made that, that was a hover over. We started to actually-- this is an operating building that we have, so we wanted to pin over that to the property management site. So when somebody actually hovers over that, it takes them to access all the documents and plans and information and requests that can be made on that building, as well.

So we're really trying to build out where we do our business slowly. And this is a file that we use consistently on new projects if they're within this downtown Fort Lauderdale area. And we just keep adding more and more and more and more information to it so that we can really get as much out of the investment that we've made in it as possible.

So now that we've got all this information into InfraWorks, now we have to collaborate. So how did Brian and I actually work on this together? How did we start trading all this point cloud data and uploading and downloading files? It was actually-- InfraWorks has made it fairly easy, right?

BRIAN SMITH: And I'd like to say, you live in Florida and I live in Washington state.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: Yeah, we live on possibly the furthest two points away from each other that we could, unless we lived in Alaska or Hawaii. So we wanted to start sharing this information. So if you're familiar with InfraWorks, you probably know about different proposals and the synchronized function. This has been greatly improved, I feel. Over a year ago when we were using it, we would get lots of issues.

This year, we worked pretty seamlessly. We didn't lose any data, everything seemed to move back and forth, the upload and download times were pretty solid on them. You do need some pretty good internet, but this allows us to share different things. Brian might be working in one proposal that's talking about the scan or the master file, I might be working on logistics. You can see that we've got some other things in here where I started to strip away buildings. I just want to see just the site. So as we shared this information with us, as soon as we synced our changes, we could see what the other person was working on.

Once we were inside of InfraWorks, if you don't know about the design feed, It's actually a really good tool for having a conversation around the model. And what this allows you to do is create a comment feed, if you will, about what you're talking about here. So for example, I put a little note in here. It says, it looks like this trailer is actually going to fit underneath here. But this can be a tool for your superintendents, this could be a tool for anybody who's working on your team to go ahead and put information in or ask questions about it.

The one slightly annoying thing is these bubbles are absolutely ginormous and I haven't found a way to change them yet. So if anybody knows, please let me know. But you can turn them off pretty quickly, because as soon as you get out of the design feed, the bubbles actually go away. They only show up when the design feed is active. But Brian and I tested this out a bit, talking back and forth about, hey, can you move this over here? Hey, when are you going to add this file in? And things like that, and it was actually a really good experience collaborating inside the software.

BRIAN SMITH: And again, you don't have to be a user-- a big CAD user or even a BIM guy to be able to click on that one spot and make an annotation and share it with whoever. So we're trying to, again, take all this data, democratize it into a useful common data set that everybody's building and looking at the same thing. It's not a piece of paper, it's not something that's old. It's relevant to what the design team is currently working on.

KRISTOPHER LENGIEZA: So once we were done with that, we said, OK, we're far enough along now, let's share this out to the web. So we can share a link with other individuals or team members so that they could go ahead and see this without InfraWorks. So if you haven't done this before, you can publish this to InfraWorks 360. It doesn't actually bring a 3D model. What it does is it brings an orthographic view with all of the areas pinned on there with specific panorama views or viewpoints pinned on there.

But as I mentioned before, all of those locations with the photos and the scans show up on here, as well. So as you can see, there's a little 16 next to that push pin, so when you click on it, there's actually 16 little links that are in that area that as you click on it, they will expand and you can see all the different ones that are available. So that allows you to dive in deeper and go ahead and either get to the photo that is tagged there or get to the scan that's tagged there. And then what you also have is these panorama views.