Using BIM 360 to Coordinate All Your InfraWorks Assets

MARK KAUFFMAN: All right, I'll go ahead and get started here. You are in Using BIM 360 to Coordinate All Your InfraWorks assets. My name is Mark Kauffman. I work for WSP USA. Some of you guys are probably like, who's WSP? Possibly, yes or no? WSP actually purchased the firm that I came from, which is Parsons Brinker Hopkins anybody heard of Parsons Brinckerhoff PB. They purchased us several years ago, and they've finally rebranded. So now, we're just WSP USA.

I work for the project visualization group based out of Denver, Colorado. And we do visualization work, among other types of things, for the projects that WSP works on. I've been using InfraWorks since it was Project Galileo. And I'm actually going to talk a little bit about that, kind of go through a quick run through.

But when I was given the opportunity to submit a class, I came up with a couple of different options. But one of them was BIM 360. WSP is an Enterprise Autodesk customer, and so we have access to BIM 360. And I've been using it a lot more. And you know, there's competing products out on the market. But of course for us, it's a nice tool to be able to use to be able to coordinate a lot of our projects.

I've been seeing a lot of the WSP Legacy people use it more often. WSP is more structures verticals. Parsons Brinckerhoff was more horizontals. It's kind of nice to bring the two together, kind of looking at the different projects. But having a lot of these BIM oriented workflows, obviously BIM 360. And of course, InfraWorks being a BIM oriented product. But one of the problems that I've run into, and I'm sure all of you. Who all uses InfraWorks here? Hopefully, all of you. OK.

One of the problems I've seen with it is the fact that, hey, you've got all this data, but it's in this model that you can share in the cloud. But what about all the assets that you're working with? You know, you're sharing it with someone outside of your office, maybe a client. And of course, they go to click on that building shapefile that you brought in, and they get that little error message. And we'll talk a little more about that.

In any case, I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about InfraWorks in general. Like I said, I've been working with it since it was Project Galileo. Who actually tried Project Galileo? Ah, a couple of you. And of course, infrastructure modeler at some point in time.

Well, here's kind of an interesting little tidbit. I was digging up some images from some first projects that I worked on. In fact, that's infrastructure modeler, so that's 2013. I think the first version was 2012. This is Presidio Parkway and brought in an actual model and then integrated the roads. I was so excited to have a product that actually had the ability to do roads. Because in visualization, trying to integrate roads into a topo was always such a pain. Because we would build it in, say, 3ds Max, and we have to draw the edges of the terrain to the road surface itself. And this would do it like that. You could do degrading and even basic things back then.

And I brought up a couple of interesting things I'd done. When you would go into Infraworks and Infrastructure Modeler and they have all the sample files, well the San Francisco model is an example of something that I worked on with some other people. And kind of interesting to go back in history to look at some different things. This is some more recent projects that I've been working on.

This one is for Charlotte Gateway Station. It's a multi-modal station that the city of Charlotte is looking at developing this area. And they want to not look at just the station but all the surrounding areas. What was kind of interesting about this was, they wanted the opportunity to have meetings, like design charrettes with both the public and the stakeholders.

And, you know, they were talking about getting architects, and landscape architects, and engineers, and designers, and DOT people, and city people all together in one place, and then also bringing the public at some point over a couple day period. We're talking like people up on sketches, and doing things, and then coming together and presenting that to the public.

And we're thinking well, wouldn't InfraWorks be a great tool to use for that? Because you could sit down and do a little pre production work, throw an InfraWorks model together for the city of Charlotte, and then start looking at those areas. And they did the sketches. We shot it with a cell phone, brought it into InfraWorks, overlaid it, and started extruding out buildings and looking at some different options. It actually worked out pretty nicely. And having that ability to do it in just kind of simple files.

And then also, it seemed to be that the Charlotte team's really happy with it. We ended up using it for this light rail study. That's a couple of years ago, when we actually did a design road, and did some SDF files, and did some extrusions. Ended up doing rail guideways with it, and they were all excited because they could look at the model and actually utilize it.

And you know, some examples of some other things. Actually, that is the Charlotte Gateway Station. That's that. This was done in a day. We just took and modeled this out. I took the picture and just did some massings over there. Did a couple of little extra things. They wanted signature buildings in there, so we put this little arch thing that was built in 3ds Max in about 15 minutes and loaded into the application. So kind of interesting.

And of course, most recently-- and I'm talking about this in two days-- is the Chicago model. We're starting to get into these bigger projects. That is the city of Chicago. And it's like well, it looks fine. When you actually get down into it, I don't know. There's some hundred-and-some thousand buildings in there and all the roads. And we did a first version of this. And of course now, we've gone to a newer version.

The first version had Cyber City 3D buildings. They were just white buildings. And Cyber City makes nice buildings, but they're just white. So we decided to get something with materials on it, and we actually did a design competition. Put it in scans and a whole bunch of other, loaded in some Revit files and whatnot.

So the interesting thing about this class was this whole notion, like I said. Trying to get this data out to your clients, out to your partners that are working on the file, the biggest problem you have is who is managing the data, how do you get it in there. And if you're the one who's building this InfraWorks file, you've got all your assets, but it's on your hard drive. Or, it's on your server. And then you have to hand that off to, say, the DOT who's maybe collaborating on this project. It gets to be a real pain in this side right here.

So one of the things I came up with was, why can't we use BIM 360 to coordinate a lot of this data? BIM 360 not some glorified-- who has OneDrive, or Dropbox, or Box, or one of these other kinds of accounts? They're great tools, cloud based tools you can share out with your clients, share out with your whoever you need to share it out with. Problem is, they're kind of just dumb file servers. Maybe they have a little bit more information or a little bit capability. Once you get into more of these kinds of tools, BIM 360 is nice that it has a whole bunch of other tools. You can kind of manage who has access to the files and whatnot. So I wanted to go through that whole process here.

So who actually has a BIM 360 account and uses it on a regular basis? OK. Probably not a lot of you. BIM 360 is still kind of in its infancy. I'm actually beginning to like it a lot more, probably because of the large model viewer that's available. And we'll talk a little bit about that. We'll get a chance to look at it.

But I want to go kind of through the general process. And I posted the Documents this morning. Yes, I am a bad person. I was supposed to get all this stuff posted weeks ago, but just didn't work out that way. You know how life is, especially when you say yes to a project, and you shouldn't have. But anyway, so I want to walk kind of through the general capabilities of BIM 360, how to get it set up for your projects, and go ahead and set up your data, setting up folder structure, setting up permissions. We'll kind of go through those basic things. And we'll talk about specific workflows that I've come up with for InfraWorks to be able to coordinate those assets.

So the first thing is, of course when you first log in, if you have a BIM 360, usually it's going to be at least BIM 360 Docs. There's several different versions. There's Glue, there's Field. There's a couple of other ones out there. But for this particular demonstration, we're focusing exclusively on Docs. Docs is kind of the generalized, this is a file server type of thing. Field is good if you're doing a lot of survey work or field inspections, things like that. Glue is more coordination with construction, data models, and so on and so forth. This is kind of a, shall we say, junior level. You can take it up to some pretty high levels, but we'll just start with this.

OK. So when you first log in, you're going to want to create a project. So any kind of project you create is just going to be like a project folder you have on your file server. You're going to set up as an admin, you're going to say, hey, listen these people have access to these folders. You can set up groups. If you've all worked with Active Directory with Windows or a similar type of network operating system, you have permissions set up, groups of people that can use it. You can set up same types of situations like this.

So the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to go ahead, and you're going to create your account. Now, you're going to get into this window. And right over at this little area, you're just going to go ahead and add a project. I will say that I apologize. I don't know what the lower tiers are, but the Enterprise tiers, we just have carte blanche to do as much stuff as we want. There may be limitations to the amount of storage space that you have with different tiers of BIM 360, but for the most part you just create the projects as you need them.

And of course, the next thing is these are focused more towards BIM oriented workflows, probably more for verticals. They're really starting to get more into dealing with infrastructure projects, which is really good. So when you create it, you give it a name. The important thing to note, though, is especially when you're working with InfraWorks, a lot of times why create all these projects if you can create one project that's really simple and easy to work with? And you can archive them for later and whatnot.

But the most important thing is these guys right here, little asterisks. Those are the ones you have to fill in. Now, I went ahead and just did a mockup project. And I realized, I can't get rid of this project now. And they're going to be sitting here at corporate saying, what is this I-70 mountain rail corridor? Well I just decided to do something fun, and watch someone in the corporate team say, are we doing a rail corridor on I-70 in Colorado? No, it's just for fun.

Construction type, project type, whole bunch of different options that you can go ahead and set up. This is really superfluous, but kind of some important things is, this is helping you to know who's running the project, what time zone it's based off of, if it's in a specific geography, especially if you're working with teams across the United States and Canada or maybe Europe and Asia. Some of the basic things to get you set up.

And again, depending on the tier that you're at, you're going to see three options. In our particular case, the first one is Document Management, we have BIM 360 Glue, and Field. Now for this again, all you really need is BIM 360 Docs. That's the document management. It's a simple tool to be able to utilize. Once you create that, the next thing that's going to happen, when you click on this Activate button over here, is you're going to get a little dialogue that's going to say, who's the administrator or administrators for the account? Depending on the size of the project, it's probably good to have at least one person, possibly two. It kind of depends on what your procedures are to deal with who has access to the account and be able to do it. So let's say I get run over by an ice cream truck. Well, who's going to take over and manage the accounts?

The next thing that's going to come up is, it's going to ask you once you've created the account, who are the people that are going to be at accessing this account? You do not have to add any people at this point in time. You have the ability to add more users later on. You can specify their roles. You can specify their permissions in other ways, and we'll look at that in a minute here. But it's a pretty simple process.

Now the cool thing is if you have someone that's in your organization, you add them in. It's never been added. You can say they're with WSP USA, or maybe WSP UK, whatever. Or, perhaps it's Colorado Department of Transportation or MTA. Whatever, it doesn't matter. You have the ability add them in there. Let's say you do a lot of stuff with C-DOT or a lot of stuff with Condot. Well if that's the case, you're going to see that same person. They're going to pop up in the list, and they're going to go ahead and have access. You don't have to reenter that information in, so it remembers that data from project to project, especially if you work with lots of them at the same time.

And of course, the next thing that's going to happen is you're going to have your name. It puts company. What is their role? They're a contractor, they're an architect, they're whatever. Do you have to fill that information in? No. It's a pretty simple system, but depending on what level of, shall we say, micromanagement you want to have to your project, you can. Again, this is more BIM 360 oriented stuff, but it's some kind of just hey, where do I go? Do I have to do this? BIM 360's as loose as you want to be or as tight as you want to be. That's the kind of nice thing about it. But as any kind of system is, the more organized you are with your permissions, setting up your users, different things like that, processes, is going to also determine how it is to work with getting people out of the system, or being able to coordinate lots of different elements later on.

Now this is kind of a nice tip. I like to throw this in, because one of the things that happens is, OK. So you log in, and you see that first screen. There was an admin. In fact, I'll go back there real quick. You'll see that there was an admin log in and a Docs log in. If you go to admin, it takes you kind of to a separate site. And then of course, do you have to log off the admin and then go into Docs? Well, no. You can simply just go to this little icon right here. It's pretty consistently throughout the interface, and that's this little menu icon. It kind of depends on what they want. There's either the little dot, whether they call it the hamburger icon. It's usually some sort of menu thing. By clicking on this, it brings up a contextual menu that allows you to switch between the different systems.

So in this case, account admin is hey, these are the people that I want to be able to administer all the accounts in general. Or, I want to do admin for the specific project or document management. And of course, it's dependent on the login credentials that you have. By the way, if you have questions at any point, just go ahead and raise your hand. Won't mess the stream of the whole project here.

And of course, the other thing that we have inside the interface is this right here. So in this case, I've got it set up for WSP USA Global. I have this little contextual menu here I can go ahead and click on. That pops up a list of all the different projects I have access to. So you don't have to log off and then go into a separate project. You just switch to this one. Makes it a little bit easier, especially if you're an admin for multiple accounts.

OK. So you've got your project created. And we're going to go through the process of just kind of creating your basic folder structure. I actually brought this up, because this drove me frickin' nuts the first time I really started using this. This little ellipsis icon is what you need to be able to add things. Now the problem is that you'll click on this, you'll add a folder in there, and there will be a subfolder like this. And you can kind of see what I've done over here on the side.

But as a result, BIM 360 will then put in one of those little horizontal scroll bars at the bottom. Suddenly, you don't see any ellipsis. You're clicking on the folder, and it's like I can't manage anything. Nothing's happening! And I sat there for 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure that out. Closed the damn web browser, brought it back up again, closed it again. I'm like, what's wrong with this? Tried a different web browser, went to Chrome, went to Edge, went to Internet Explorer. It was just dumb user error, me being the dumb one.

But kind of a nice little tip is just use the little horizontal scroll bar here to go ahead and reveal your ellipsis. So the ellipsis, whatever folder you're clicking on, that's how you get access to these options here. So when you first started up, you've got two options. It's a default for every project. The first one is Plans, and this is where you have the ability to post plan sets, so anything you generate out of your documents. So if it's a Revit file, you can generate plans out of that Civil 3D. If it's just plan sets that you're generating out of whatever product, that's the nice thing about this. It doesn't matter if it's not Civil 3D or Revit. It'll work with MicroStation, and it'll work with some of your Esri projects, and a lot of the other types of applications you have to work with.

But in this case, you have a lot of your basic options here. And this is kind of consistently what you're going to end up using a lot of times when you're creating your project folders. So of course, add sub folder, you can rename them, you can upload stuff, you can share. Share is, I want to share this folder and send it to someone really quick. Just kind of makes it a little bit easier, kind of similar to what you would have in Windows. Most of you guys are probably using Windows for your workflow. But similar types of network operating systems, you right-click on it. I want to share this with this group of people or this particular person. Add attributes, sort by, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, it's ultimately going to be important this option right here, setting permissions.

All right. So I went ahead and created kind of a basic folder structure. Now I have my way of doing things. You're all going to have your own individual ways of setting up your folder structure.

The nice thing is you can set it any way that you want. You can set it for whatever your business processes are, the particular client requirement, whatever. It doesn't matter.

In this case, I just kind of set it up so I have everything grouped by 3D models. I have all my bit maps. Bit maps are usually just things I end up using in the application, such as overlays or other kinds of things. I even have subfolders specifically for info works over here. And we'll talk a little bit about some of this stuff here in a couple of minutes.

So of course, the next thing is-- we created our folder structure, and we want to start adding permissions. So again, you just click on your little ellipsis file here, our little icon. I'm going to go ahead and select permissions.

And at this point, you can go ahead and go through the process of setting who has access. Now remember I told you when you created the project you have the ability to add users to it. It's not important that you have to add everybody there. People come into the project. They go away from the project.

So at this point in time, you're just going to get this little dialog box right here. And I went ahead and added one of my colleagues into there, Josh. It saw him in the system. Hey, Josh, has been in there before. I didn't have to fill in what company he's with and so on and so forth.

But I do have some basic setups. So for instance, I can set it so he only can upload files. I can set it so he can read, he can upload, he can edit, and he can control, so different kind of levels of permission that you have for those folders.

And you can specify it on a per folder basis, too, to say that Josh only has access to the Josh Jones folder. In this case, it's a good example. So we worked on a project in Chicago where we had an InfraWorks model. And we had a whole bunch of architects that were competing on this design project about the river, along in Chicago.

And we set up folders for the individual architects so that they could upload and download files for their particular group. But they couldn't see the other architects' work. So it's just kind of a quick way of being able to exchange data.

And of course, you can select the individual folder and be able to change them. But now, here comes the part where we need to start uploading our files. So how do you get them up there? It's pretty simple.

Now one bad thing about BIM 360 is that you cannot select a whole folder and upload the folder. It wants you to do files. You can do multiple files at the same time. So you can say I want all of these CAD files in this folder to upload to that location.

But you can't say I want to take my folder structure for my project and upload it. It won't take it. It won't take the individual folders. I'm hoping that's actually part of some tools.

I've heard mumblings with some of the product teams about ways of integrating with Active Directory and some other interesting things. Whether that's actually going to happen, we don't know. But that would be a nice thing if you could synchronize BIM 360 with your network. That would be kind of cool. Keep your fingers crossed.

And of course, right click-- or sorry, ellipses, not right click-- Upload Files. There's this other option here called Linked Files. This is specifically when you're dealing with linked CAD files. So you have xrefs associated with that. You can have all the linked files.

This is nice because you can open up a document, like, say, a Civil 3D document. It has some basic capabilities in the large model viewer and some of the other features inside BIM 360 would be able to say, hey, I can see all your sheet sets. I need to be able to see all those x reps to work with that. So you don't have to have Civil 3D or something else installed on your system.

So once you start uploading your files, you have what you have. But the nice thing about BIM 360, unlike some of the other tools we have, like your OneDrive, your Google Docs or whatever-- yeah, OneDrive is great. You can look at your Word documents , your Excel files, and so on and so forth.

Some of them will actually play back your video files and view your image files. That's nice. This actually has the ability to read lots of different file formats and go ahead and place them in there. So I just took a bunch of FBX files, piped it up here. And these are the FBX files.

Now again, the one big problem is you load these assets into InfraWorks, they're in my document. They're on my network. But what if I hand it off to you?

And you're, like, but I need to move this file and do stuff. And it pops up with that annoying little saying, you don't have this file. You are not worthy.

Well, you should be worthy. You should be able to go back up here and say, hey, it's located at this location. And that's why it's good to come up with some sort of schema.

And what I mean by schema is, maybe just a basic document explanation for your project to say, hey, all the FBX files go here. They're associated with the names of the buildings, metadata, whatever else that you have inside there. OK? So what I did is I uploaded them. And slowly, BIM 360 goes through, reads all those FBX files, and actually creates a simple orthographic view, isometric view of each individual piece.

So I can see what's up there. Not just the name of the building, but what it looks like. And there's some other additional options in here.

The other important thing is this right here, V1. Anybody guess what that's for? Version control, yes!

So if you want to go back and you find out that some yahoo decided to say, oh, I thought we're putting in the new design for such and such. No, no, you want to go back, down three levels. In fact that happened to me last night. I was working on a proposal.

And the team said, oh, we want to make a bunch of changes. And of course, I'm here in Las Vegas, not in Denver, not able to work on it. I hand it off to my team in Denver. And one of them says, oh, here's this proposal.

We want to change the roads. And no, we want to do this construction phasing. Well, they went back to the old phasing, and they overrode all the files that I had just updated that weekend that they messed up in the first place. And that was just a miscommunication. And my team is not incompetent. It's just me not communicating as well in that particular situation.

But the ability to go back and take that previous file and say, oh, is the one I fixed. It's great to know there. And all this stuff is automatically processed in the background. That's the nice thing about the cloud. It does all that stuff for you.

So you start adding your files in. So you kind of see now how this tool can be really useful. It's not just data storage. It's metadata storage. It's all the other things that you need to utilize with that.

And of course, the large model viewer-- this is what happens when you open it up inside your browser-- you can see the building. And it has all the information. So I built this one inside of 3ds Max as I just looked at pictures, oblique images for the building. I got a building footprint and then built that.

You could do it in Revit or SketchUp or Rhino or whatever you want. Whatever program that you use, you can go ahead and load it up here, with a couple of exceptions. You can't read Pro-Engineer files in here. But you can't have everything.

But you have all the data. I have all the individual pieces that made up this building. I have some tools down here on the bottom. We'll talk a little bit about them, to be able to go through. I can do cross sections. I can do markups, whole bunch of other stuff.

Large model viewer is the bomb. It's a great tool to be able to share content. In fact, it's been kind of nice because-- who's used 3D PDFs to go ahead and do design reviews? OK? It's kind of nice, because most people have Acrobat, don't they, or something similar? They can read Acrobat if you have-- but you have to be able to generate a 3D PDF.

What if you could just send them a link to a web file? And all you have to do is have access to it, and they can view it, and they can do whatever they want with it. They don't have to have any special software to be able to do that. Because everybody has a web browser, right? And pretty much, you know, it used to be Internet Explorer, but now Chrome is the way to go.

OK. And of course, I put together-- this is also in the document. But this is kind of a quick list of what you have. I didn't know this was available. Anybody know what that is right there?

It's Rhino. OK. So one of the things I've been finding is architects like to work with SketchUp a lot, right? SketchUp is pretty ubiquitous. The other one they really are starting to work with even more so than SketchUp is Rhino.

And one of the reasons they really like Rhino, in fact, I'm seeing a lot of structural people, a lot of structural engineers, infrastructure engineers starting to work with Rhino. Because there's this great little plug in that comes with it called Grasshopper. Grasshopper allows you to do some really interesting things.

Has anybody ever worked with Dynamo with Revit? It's a similar type of tool. The nice thing about Rhino is it's more like pure design. But you can do some more technical, it's a NURBS-based model or solid modelers, not as-- probably a little bit more user friendly in some ways, compared to Revit. But it doesn't have a lot of the tools that Revit has.

So a lot of architects will mock things up in SketchUp and they'll also mock them up in Rhino. They'll go ahead and build them out. Get the general designs out. Play with them, because they're quick and easy to work with.

But when they get down to brass tacks, and finally come down with the general idea of what they want to do, what do they do? They move to Revit, and they start building everything out. Again, the nice thing is you have all this stuff.

So there's lots of different formats-- RVT, Navisworks, FBX, DGN, of course, DWGs. I think that's Katia, even some more generic STLs I think that's SolidWorks. So there's lots of different formats.

The one thing I am really disappointed on is this-- viewable media file types, JPGs. Yes, you got to do JPGs. It's a given. PNGs-- it's another given, PDFs-- yes. What about MP4 files, some other kind of video formats, couple of other data file tiffs. Targa is maybe a little esoteric, but tiffs would be good.

Things that people work with a lot of print documents-- sometimes when they scan, it scans to a tiff. It'd be nice if they could add a couple of things. It probably wouldn't take much to do it.

But at least it has all this stuff. And it will read it and put up a model or a sheet file or anything else that you can look at. OK. So any questions so far about the BIM 360 part?

OK. So at this point, it's just a matter of mating your data together. Now unfortunately, this is a manual process. You don't have the ability to synchronize your Active Directory with BIM 360. You have to take all your content and upload it to a centralized location.

But this is the way to be able to share the data and specify who has access to it. Especially if you have someone that's working on this. And again, let's say you have someone that's working on a Revit file for a building in a particular location.

You saw with that Chicago model, that was a really, really nice development along the riverfront? That's a Revit model. We actually loaded that PIG into InfraWorks, and it runs. I am amazed, because that thing was a beast.

It had, like, individuals sinks and levers and everything on every single unit of those high rises. But we were able to get it in. And it was able to go through and run it.

But in any case, if we had someone working on that file, we could actually synchronize it. And we just have to manually pull it down from BIM 360, upload it to our folder, and hit synchronize. And there it is. Any updates, we're able to do that, same thing with the FBS files.

We had people working with OBJs, 3ds Max models, SketchUp files. We had a bunch of the designers-- or, sorry-- the infrastructure guys working with inroads files. We were taking ALGs out, bringing them into Civil 3D, converting them into-- bring them into Civil 3D, converting them into Civil 3D files, bringing those into InfraWorks, and synchronizing and doing a road. It was crazy stuff. But it was one way to go ahead and set it up so that the guys would say, HNTB, or the people with C dot or the people with whatever were able to work with that kind of data.

So one of the first things I wanted to talk about was, OK, so who has used that wonderful scenario tool inside InfraWorks? OK. What do you think about it? Oh, yeah. You guys sound really thrilled to death about it.

Sorry. If there's any people with the InfraWorks dev team here, it's a horrible, horrible tool. The idea of the way it works is great. But if you try to ever run one of those things on a web browser? It doesn't always work.

It's a little bit picky. It's a very small area. It's kind of a pain. But you know, it's a tool that you can use for-- nah, it's not great.

So one of the things I've found out is that Large Model Viewer is a great tool for being able to share your files with your clients. Even if it's just I want to show you what it looks like, similar to what you would use with the scenario tool to be able to show, hey, this is this particular proposal with this whatever. I can tumble it inside my Chrome or web browser.

Hell, you can even load it up inside your iPhone or your Android device. Before, running that scenario tool and model viewer with the app that-- it was terrible. It was awful. And it kind of depended, if you have even a really high end iPad, it was still like eh. Just don't put a big model in there.

Well, this is the case that you don't have to worry about it anymore. As you can see here, this is actually a project in Wheat Ridge Colorado, which is kind of just out to west of downtown Denver. There is an RTV station right there.

And we were working on a project in InfraWorks, where they wanted to look at a bunch of different designs for a pedestrian bridge. They wanted to look at different signature type bridges and how it integrates into the existing station and so on and so forth. So we mocked it up in InfraWorks.

Hey, it's great, loved it. But we wanted a way to be able to share it with the client. Well, here's what I found out. So this is a good example of some different workflows of how you would utilize BIM 360 with InfraWorks.

So in this case, ta da! Export to 3D models. Now you can't bring in IMX files into-- well, let me reclassify that or recategorize that. You can bring an IMX file into BIM 360. It just can't read it. It's just raw data.

In fact, the important thing to always remember about BIM 360 is, yes, there are file types that it doesn't read natively and be able to convert into something for the Large Model Viewer. But that doesn't matter. In fact, one of the workflows I have is taking your entire work-- your entire InfraWorks file, zipping it up, and sending it up to BIM 360.

Anybody ever try to synchronize a model and it doesn't work? Because the web server that they use is being cranky that day? Well, one way to do that is just to zip it up and send it to someone. But that could be a big file, right?

I think the biggest one I had was 16 gigs. 16 gigs, zip it up, put it on BIM 360, and pull it down to another machine. Go ahead and extract it to the appropriate folder, and hit sync. And then, it's, like, oh, well, hey, there it is. I have it, as long as you have access, of course, which is kind of nice.

So in this case, if you've ever used the Export 3D Model tool, this allows you to export to an FBX and OBJ or a COLLADA DAE file. With this, you go ahead and select the area you want, and of course, if you've ever done this before, there's a couple of different tools. Define interactively, bounding box, or polygon area-- you can go ahead and draw out the area that you want to export.

Oops! Stupid finger! Next one is target coordinate system. Nice thing is-- is you can always go back and edit if you need to, do the entire model, et cetera. Enter in xy coordinates if you remember that stuff.

Target coordinate systems-- by the way, I put inside the document that goes with this class-- I did a class on how to do data conversions, how to coordinate single precision non-geospatial applications with geospatial applications. Basically, it's, like, hey, I work in SketchUp. I work in 3ds Max. I work in what have you, which is not a double precision geospatial application. I need to be able to get my data from here to there and back again.

And I came up with a really effective way to be able to synchronize your models. And it's really effective for InfraWorks. Because I'm a visualization person, I'm doing a lot of very pretty models that I need to integrate into InfraWorks to build out the context or whatever.

What's important, though, is trying to get that damn thing from 3ds Max into InfraWorks without having to do the interactive moving or typing in numbers. Come up with a really effective way of creating custom coordinate systems. And you can just click on this nifty little button right here, select your negative coordinate system, and call it whatever you want-- my coordinate system for word station-- boom!

Model comes in. It's a good way of exchanging data between the two points. So there's the nice document you can download that's already up on the AU site. Target files-- you can even go out to individual layers if you want.

But what's always important to do is, of course, these are defaulted to on. This expand materials textures and merge objects with the same texture. But you also have this, large FBX file support. Now this is good for BIM 360 because it supports some of the newer versions of FBX. So it can handle really big, big models.

But I haven't tried it with a really, really big file. That Chicago model as an FBX would probably be epically large, probably in the 10 to 15 gigabyte size. It would be fun to try it.

But it's always good to check this, especially if you have a larger area that's maybe a couple blocks. You'd probably only have to with a couple blocks. But if you're area is, like, say, half a mile to a mile, you may want to start thinking about that. But I-- you just check it anyway. It's just easier to deal with.

I would recommend FBX only because it is an Autodesk property, intellectual property. They do a pretty decent job most of the time with being able to read it and work with it. And it also stores all the materials and everything in there format-wise. Sometimes OBJ works a little bit better, but for the most part, FBX works pretty good.

And of course, you get to the point where you have to upload it. And as you can see here, and I've got a fat finger-- come on, go back. Whatever, there we go. I give up. OK.

So in this case, you saw that model that was back there a little while ago. Exported it as an FBX, brought it into the Large Model Viewer. And the Large Model Viewer, like I said, has a whole bunch of great tools in there. If you're sending it to your client, I want to go ahead and have the ability to do some basic markup.

So there's a markup feature. That's right over here. And it brings it up, and you can go ahead and do text and you can do drawing. And you can do all this other stuff. You can go to different views and take screenshots of that and use that as markup and coordinate it with the documents themselves.

Of course, the other things you can do is you've got the ability to do some basic navigation. We can do measurements. And it actually snaps to the geometry. It does it better than InfraWorks does.

Wait a minute. InfraWorks doesn't do it very well. But it snaps and actually gives information. And it stays in place! Once you move it around and you deselect it, it's still there until you clear it out. Thank you!