Visualize Before You Vote: Using InfraWorks to Help Voters Make Informed Choices

MIKE SMITH: Thanks for coming, you guys. I appreciate it. Hope you guys are having a good conference thus far. Winding down a little bit here towards the end.

My name is Mike Smith. I'm a Project Engineer at AECOM in Denver, Colorado. I work at the transportation group, but I work more in land development. And today we're going to talk about Visualize Before You Vote: Using InfraWorks to Help Voters Make an Informed Choice.

So I'm going to break this presentation down into three sections. We're going to do the first section, we're going to talk about the project background because the whole point to this thing is sort of a case study in how we used InfraWorks on a real world project to create a visualization that we then shared with voters, and then they could make a better choice when they made their vote.

The second part, we're going to do a little technical live demo. We'll do some techniques for how to get your civil 3D design into InfraWorks and to make it look appropriate.

And then part three, if we have a good amount of time we can do some questions and answers. And hopefully, you guys can come out of here with a better idea of how to use InfraWorks for visualization, and maybe with some ideas on maybe how you could implement it on some of your own projects.

So project background. So as I mentioned, I work more in land development. In Denver, there is the Stapleton redevelopment. And basically, what Stapleton is is before Denver International Airport was built, there was the Stapleton Airport in Denver. And if you see on the map here, this is where it used to be. It was very close to downtown, and it was the original major airport out of Denver.

In 1995, DIA, the idea for DIA got passed through. And in 2001, they opened DIA and they started demolishing the old Stapleton airport. So since 2001, it's been under redevelopment by Forest City.

And up until very recently, and it still might even be, it is the largest infill project in the United States. 4,700 acres, nine neighborhoods, nine public schools, 50 parks. There's also tons of restaurants, mixed use, shopping.

And AECOM is the project manager of the development, and we have been since it started. Of course, we weren't AECOM at the time. It was Dames and Moore and then it was URS, but now it's AECOM.

And so I've been with AECOM for a couple years and I've kind of got to work on the tail end of it. But the people that came before me did most of the development.

So I think this is kind of a cool visualization of how far we've come with Stapleton. If you look up here, you can see the old airport-- this is in 1995-- where the old runways used to run. There were some east-west runways and some north-south runways.

And if we look now in 2017, you can see that's been completely redeveloped. There's a lot of single family housing. There's Dick's Sporting Goods stadium where the MLS team in Colorado plays is up here. That's not actually technically in Stapleton, but it's directly adjacent to it.

You can also see where that east-west runway was down here. That's all been redeveloped as well. So over the last 16 years or so, we've taken it from an airport, which was basically flat for runways, and we've had to regrade the whole thing to make it drain, and created a housing development, basically, in place of where the old airport was.

And like I said, we're almost done. The project is almost built out. There's just a little bit of development left. We're kind of finishing up a few filings. But we're almost there.

So one key component to the Stapleton redevelopment is Martin Luther King Boulevard. So Martin Luther King Boulevard runs east to west through Denver. And it currently pretty much bisects where Stapleton is. If you look at that-- if we go back-- you can kind of see it. It's down here. So it runs kind of parallel to where the old east-west runways were, and it's a major arterial road.

But currently, the very end of MLK Boulevard ends right around here. And the arterial structure of the road sort of dies and it becomes a two-lane street, Havana Way. And then eventually, it kind of wraps around and become Moline Street here. And so there's a lot of traffic that's traveling eastbound on MLK that has to go through the residential area, down Moline. They have to make a right, and then they can get onto the arterials on this side of this open space. So, the plan for the MLK Boulevard extension is to extend the road from here through this open space and to connect with this intersection here. This is Peoria Street, and this is Fitzsimons Parkway.

Also in the project is the-- Also part the scope of the project is to widen the road from two lanes to four lanes. We're going to add a couple of wide multi-use trails, and there's actually going to be an equestrian trail as well, which is kind of an oddity. Because Sand Creek runs through here, there is a Bluff Lake nature conservancy area here, and so on the north side the road we're going to add a equestrian trail that's basically just decomposed granite, so the horses can walk and not hurt themselves.

There's also a new stormwater quality pond that's going to go in, and that will treat about half the runoff from the road as well as future development that will occur in this open space. You can see here, these are previous Stapleton filings. They have sort of a distinctive look because of the way the urban planner likes to lay things out. And here, we have some newer filings that I actually designed, that are under construction.

So, here's a plan of what it looks like. You can see that intersection here, where we start to merge into the more arterial-style road. And we diverge from the existing Moline Street and continue that along through the open space. There's some realignment here of Moline so that it intersects MLK perpendicularly. And then, there's some future roads that'll go in here when the development occurs in this open space area. The stormwater quality pond is here.

One thing that's sort of interesting about the project is that it's on the border of the city and county of Denver and the city of Aurora. And you can see that it's marked on this exhibit here. But we'll see in the next slide, that sort of presents some challenges for the project.

So yes, special considerations. So, the project was originally considered in 2011, but it was shelved at that time. There wasn't enough interest in that land for the developer to go ahead and build the road. So, there was a lot of environmental assessments. Preliminary design was prepared, but it didn't go through in 2011. Like I mentioned before, it's located at the boundary of the city and county of Denver and the city of Aurora, so there is an intergovernmental agreement in place, which dictates things like whose engineering standards we have to follow, whose going to take care of the maintenance of the road and the stormwater quality pond.

There's also federal funding for the project. I'm too low of a level to really understand how this all works out, but basically, the bottom line here is that 48% of the project comes from federal funding through the FHWA. And 52% comes from the developer in the city and county of Denver. So, those are some of the quirks associate with the project, and that's sort of what got us to the complications that necessitated the InfraWorks model. So, we'll talk about that a little bit.

So yeah, federal funding, some strings attached. Like I mentioned, there's the IGA. There's the city and county Denver. There's the city of Aurora. And then, CDOT also wants to look at our plans, so we have to get our drawings through three different agency reviews, which is-- even getting through one can be a nightmare sometimes, but going through three and trying to make everybody happy has been a real challenge with the project. Also, the federal government has some additional environmental requirements, and what really was the big one for us here was the CDOT Noise Abatement Guidelines.

So, as part of the CDOT Noise Abatement Guidelines, a noise analysis was performed for the project. And in 2011, they did a similar analysis, and in the conclusions in the 2011 analysis, they said, "You don't need to add any mitigating measures. The sound increase is not going to be above a certain threshold." Now, of course, they decided they wanted to redo it in 2016, and late in the project, we got the news that, hey, our new analysis says you guys need to implement sound walls because we think they're both reasonable and feasible. So, we got kind of blindsided by this at 90% on our design. So yeah, that covers all that.

So, saving grace for us is that, per the CDOT Noise Abatement Guidelines, we get to do a benefited receptor survey. And basically what this is, is those people that the noise analysis determined would be susceptible to a noise increase get to basically vote on whether or not they want to have noise abatement measures implemented. So, this is a sample ballot of what we've sent them. It's very simple ballot. We sent them via certified mail with the help of the city and county of Denver.

We had to sort of work with them to figure out exactly how we wanted to go about this, to make sure that we weren't doing anything that was uncouth. One kind of interesting thing too was that the property owners, if the property owners lived in the residence, they got a single vote. But if they rented the residents out to a tenant, then both the property owner and the tenant got to vote, and they could vote differently. So, that kind of complicated figuring out how many ballots showed up.

So, before the vote we did a lot of public outreach to try to get people to think about this wall, like, do you really want this wall? It's going to be a serious thing. So, there were several town-hall-style meetings that were co-sponsored by the city and county of Denver. We have a CMAR on the project. Mortenson Construction, they went out and they built a mock-up of what the wall might look like, just with plywood.

The city and county of Denver prepared a really nice website that had a bunch of information about the project and provided some fact sheets and stuff. And we also sent a sound wall fact sheet with ballots to these people, so they could read about, OK, what is this wall going to look like? What kind of performance can we expect to get from the wall? And we also created an InfraWorks model, and that's what the focus of the presentation is going to be after we get through this.

So, this is a picture of the sound wall mock-up that Mortenson made. It really helps give a sense of scale of how big this thing-- it's a 12-foot-tall wall, and it's going to be right up adjacent to your home. Sort of an interesting aside, not even one day after this went up, somebody went out with some spray paint and painted a pretty graphic image on the wall. So, maybe that was some foreshadowing of what was to come if the wall actually got built.

This is the screenshot of the web page that the city and county of Denver put together for us, that had some information about the noise abatement guidelines. It had some figures and things that the people could look at and use as reference. We also-- this is just the same exhibit. We just were looking at the web page, but as part of the fact sheet, we sent out some traditional graphics that you might expect in this type of package.

And then, we also made the InfraWorks model. And we provided the InfraWorks model to them on in a few different ways. So, the InfraWorks model. So, why InfraWorks? There's a lot of different ways you can create a rendering of a project these days. A lot of people do things in 3DS Max or in, say, Lumen, or there's many different ways you can do it. But InfraWorks, at least for us, had some distinct advantages.

So, number one is that it can be created by a design engineer, a.k.a. me. You don't have to have any special artistic skills. It's somewhat easy for somebody with my engineering skill set to jump into InfraWorks and actually make a model. It can be compiled relatively quickly because InfraWorks, at least in the application, as a civil engineer, we're designing everything in Civil 3D, so almost all the data we need we already have. It's just a matter of configuring it and displaying it in InfraWorks, basically. And for AECOM, it's included in our licensing contract, so we didn't have to go out and buy any special software or anything. We already paid for it, so we could just jump right in.

It has an appropriate level of detail. So, I mentioned people can do things in Lumen or 3DS Max, and you can get a really beautiful rendering that you might use if you're trying to sell something to a client, or there's requirement for more detail to really convey what it is that you're trying to show. But in InfraWorks, for civil engineering projects, it's somewhat basic. We don't need to have fancy lighting and things that you might want to sell a condo or something, for instance. So, we thought it was an appropriate level of detail.

And then, the third major thing was the presentation options. There's a lot of ways you can present the content of your InfraWorks model. You can create an animation and outport that as a video. You can cut still image screenshot type stuff out of the model. You could even go into VR if you wanted, either via 3DS Max and Stingray, or you can just take an FBX out of your InfraWorks model, bring that into Navasworks, and you can create a Google Cardboard-type VR situation, if you so pleased.

And then, the other thing is the web viewer, the InfraWorks web viewer. I think it's sometimes an overlooked tool, but if you use it properly it can be pretty powerful in conveying your model, because there's some ability for the user to navigate themselves. You can turn layers on and off. You can include canned animations. There's a lot of things you can do in that web viewer that add impact to the visualization that you're trying to share.

So, a couple of keys to success when you're going to take your civil data and you're going to put it into InfraWorks. Number one is make sure that as you design your project, you're putting in adequate detail. Sometimes in civil engineering, we can kind of get sloppy and lazy, and we don't have to model everything. For instance, a curb ramp, sometimes people will just hand grade that and throw some spots on the plan. But if you're going to put this information into InfraWorks, you're going to want it to look good just right away.

You don't want to have to go back and re-add information to your design. And it takes a little extra effort and design, but I think it's well worthwhile. And it does benefit you on the side of design that your plan sets will probably be more complete if you do add this little bit of nuance to your designs.

Also, coordinate system. Super important understanding your coordinate system, especially if you're working on a project that has maybe a custom coordinate system. Sometimes, we can get away with not totally-- especially as engineers, not surveyors, we can get away with not totally understanding our coordinate system and maybe the grid, the ground factor, or truncations, or whatever that you're using to get your project-specific custom coordinate system.

So, understand that. Read the survey control diagram. Talk to your surveyor. Figure out exactly what coordinate system you're in because InfraWorks, everything is geolocated, and you need to know how to transform your data, if need be, to get it into InfraWorks. So, those are a couple of things that I want to emphasize if you're going to try to do this, is maybe those two are some of the more important things.

So, the class's learning objectives were to learn how to use advanced techniques, to more accurately visualize civil 3D data in InfraWorks, learn how to use custom schema to better organize your data, learn how to create animations using the InfraWorks storyboard tools, learn how to use the InfraWorks web viewer tools. And I sent out a survey, pre-class, to all of you that were enrolled at the time. It was about a week ago. And I want to just get a feel for what it was that you guys really wanted to see.

This is a lot of information to try to cover in 30 minutes here, or 45 minutes here, so I wanted to try to focus on the one thing that was most interesting to you guys. I will say that the handout is pretty comprehensive. It has a lot of information in it. And I've also created a full hour-and-a-half-long video recording of the entire process that I used while developing the model that I just showed you guys in the previous slide. And I put that on YouTube, so you guys-- there's a link to it in the handout. If you want to watch that later for a bit more detail, we can get into that because there's no way that I am going to be able to convey all this information to you guys in the next few minutes.

But, per the survey results, it was pretty clear that you guys were really most interested in the first learning objective, which was to visualize your Civil 3D data in InfraWorks. So we're going to focus on that. The second question was inconclusive. There wasn't really a lot of-- yeah, pose for the picture here.

[LAUGHING]

There wasn't really a lot of-- it wasn't obvious what you guys didn't want to see. So, we're going to just really focus on how to configure your InfraWorks data. So, with that, let's get on the computer here and do some live demonstration.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE SMITH: Oh, yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE SMITH: [LAUGHS] That actually showed up to this thing, and I didn't just--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE SMITH: Yeah. All right. So, InfraWorks. Just a show of hands, how many of you use InfraWorks? OK. So, most of you are aware of InfraWorks. And you all are probably comfortable using Model Builder to build a model, some of the more basic tasks in InfraWorks. We're going to go and gloss over that stuff because we're trying to more focus on the more advanced techniques that we're going to use to visualize our project.

So, I've already gone ahead and made a Model Builder model here of our area of interest. And as Model Builder generally does, it's not a bad model. It's got some features in it. It's got some buildings. Sand Creek came in. There's some lakes. But we can do a lot better than this, so that's what we're going to try to do over the course of the next 30 or 40 minutes.

So, the first thing I like to do is I like to go in my InfraWorks model settings after I've made it, and I like to go into the model properties. And this goes along with what I was talking about with coordinate systems. So, I like to set the user coordinate system, the UCS, of my model to the coordinate system that my design was done in. So, Stapleton, of course, has some wacky custom coordinate system, but luckily, we had that already defined in our AutoCAD coordinate system library.

So, AutoCAD and InfraWorks share the same coordinate system library, so we can just select the Stapleton coordinate system library and set that. I also want to just make sure that nothing is weird in here. Generally, a good practice is to set your roadway design standards to the AASHTO Imperial, even if we're not going to design roads. So, I already did this. I'm just going to cancel out of this. And now, we just need to close and works, pretty critical step.

Then, in Civil 3D, we're going to want to open that InfraWorks model. So, prior to the Civil 3D 2018, we had to export an IMX from InfraWorks and then import that IMX into Civil 3D. But now in '18, we can just open the database file directly, so I'm going to go ahead and do that. But before we can open the database file directly, we have to make sure that InfraWorks is closed. So, I've already navigated to the local cached location of this model. I'm going to go ahead and just open it up.

And then, one thing that's usually a good practice, is we're not going to try to use all this InfraWorks data in civil. We just need the immediate area around our site. So, we're going to select a sub area, and what's cool, since everything is set up with coordinate systems, we can zoom out, and we can see our InfraWorks model extent against the Bing imagery. And then, we can neck down our InfraWorks model just to what we want to have in Civil, so I'm just going to pick the area directly adjacent to our project area, for lack of a better--

AUDIENCE: What's your opinion on the [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE SMITH: What's my what?

AUDIENCE: The highway. Anytime I do [INAUDIBLE], highway [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE SMITH: Yeah, OK. I can show you how to fix that, maybe if we have time at the end or afterwards.

AUDIENCE: OK.

MIKE SMITH: Yeah, there's a way to fix that. So, once we've got our area of interest selected, we can go ahead and filter the selection set. I don't have time to do that, so I'm just going to hit open model. This is going to happen pretty quickly. This is not a huge area of interest.

And now, we ported our in InfraWorks surface, and there's a bunch of alignments that have come in as well. So, probably would've been a good idea to filter that selection set and not bring in all these alignments because we don't really need to use them. Maybe you do want to have them for some other reason, but basically, we need to clean up this file now to get it to a point where it just has the information we want. And I've already done that, so I'm going to go ahead and open that up.

So basically, all I've done here is just parse that data and only pretty much reduce it down just to InfraWorks existing ground topo, and that's what we're looking at here. The next thing I did is I created a data shortcut of this InfraWorks existing ground surface, and you'll see why we're going to use that data shortcut here in a second.

So, one key thing that's going to happen here is when we try to bring in our project data into InfraWorks, there's going to be a bust at where our survey meets the InfraWorks topo. There's going to be vertical data maybe that doesn't match. There's going to be huge accuracy busts because hopefully our survey is accurate, but the InfraWorks topo is just a big DEM. So, we want to work, basically, our topo against the InfraWorks topo to kind of smooth out the transition between the two.

So to do that, I'm going to open up our existing ground project survey surface. And this is kind of a wacky existing ground surface because the aerial survey is from way back in the early 2000s, and what we've done, basically, as the development has progressed, we've just pasted on the [INAUDIBLE] grading from previous filings. So, it's not extremely accurate in areas where there's development adjacent, but it's still better than what we have in InfraWorks.

So, to create this warp, what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my surface, and I'm going to set it to a border-only style. So, we're going to grab the boundary now by just clicking on a surface, extracting the surface boundary. So now, we have a 3D poly that's around the boundary of our surface.

We're going to go ahead and make a feature line out of this, and I'll use just a style that I have that I like. And then we need to data shortcut in our InfraWorks existing ground surface. We'll just put this on a border-only as well. So, that's in the drawing now too.

So, basically what we need to do is we need a daylight the boundary of our survey surface to the InfraWorks existing ground surface. Now, we could use grading objects, if you're feeling risky and want to deal with that, or we can just offset the feature line and drape it on the InfraWorks existing ground surface.

So, we're going to hit offset. Because this is such a large area, I'm going to do 100 foot offset to try to spread this warp out over a distance that we won't really be able to perceive in InfraWorks. Pick the side not the outside edge, and then we'll just set the elevation difference to zero for now.

So, now we have this offset line. We can drape that on the surface using the feature line drape command. We'll drape it on the InfraWorks existing ground. We're not going to insert grade breaks. We could, and then we'd probably want to we'd because it's going to get-- actually, no, let's put grade breaks in there. Why not? There we go. It's going to take a second. So, now we have a million points on this thing.

So, we can grab this feature line around the border of our existing surface, the feature line that we just draped on the InfraWorks surface. And we can add these to a new service that we're going to call warp. So, warp is going to just also be-- we'll just put warp on a no-show. And we don't want to add any supplementing factors.

And basically, what we're doing here is we're just, like I said, daylighting between what we have and the InfraWorks. And the last step is just to pace that warp surface on our existing ground surface. And we're done. So we can now save this drawing. And it's key that we do this-- oh, you know what? I got to change something with warp. Sorry.

So, when we add these break lines to the warp surface, it's trying to triangulate between the edges. So you want to add an outer boundary and an inner boundary to the warp surface. So, outer boundaries, we're going to do a outer, and we're going to do an inner, a hide. And then we can rebuild. That's better. So, we can save this now. And that was really thrilling, I know, but it's important that we do this so that our visualization turns out looking good, especially on the boundary condition-type stuff.

So now, we can open InfraWorks back up again, and we can start bringing in our Civil 3D data. So, if you've never done this before, it's pretty simple to bring in just your Civil 3D drawings. We'll go into our data sources here. We're going to add our Civil 3D drawings. I'm going to grab this path here. Let's drop these in. We're going to bring in our existing and proposed ground surfaces.

And we don't want to bring in-- we only want to bring in that existing and proposed ground surfaces, so we'll say OK. These are already configured because these drawings had the proper coordinate system, so we're just going to refresh those. And they're in here now, but we can't really see anything. We basically have just brought in the surfaces, but we're not even 10% of the way there in actually visualizing our project. And you know what I should have done, is it's always important to make a new proposal. So we'll do that before we get too far along here.

One other thing I'd like to do is since we're going to try to just do a visualization without using the InfraWorks types objects, I'm going to get rid of the roadways and the railways. They don't really add any value to this presentation. The aerial imagery, I think, looks fine, so we'll get rid of the roads and the railways.

So, like I said, our surfaces are in here, and you can kind of see them. There's a little bit of detail now showing up. But what we need to do now is we need to take our roadway line work design. And we need to get that into InfraWorks as materials so that we can actually see what this is going to look like.

So, this is where it gets a little tedious. And what I should say is, this is not saying that super dynamic. You're not going to continually update this as the design progresses. This is something you want to do at a milestone in your project, say at 20%, 40%, whatever. This is not something you're going to want to try to do every single time the design changes. Because we're trying to get a higher level of detail here, we have to do a few things manually.

So, to bring it in line work and configure it in InfraWorks to look like something, it's a relatively straightforward process. So, the first thing I want to bring in, is I want to bring in my grading extents. So, what I'm going to do, is I'm just going to open up a new drawing here, just out of the standard template is fine. And I'm going to set the coordinate system appropriately.

And then, I'm going to bring in my proposed ground surface, and I'm going to set it to a border-only style. The zoom extends here. There's our surface. So, I'm going to extract the boundary from the surface, like we did earlier. Then I'm going to take this 3D poly that we get out of here, and I'm going to modify this into a 2D poly. Oh boy. And I'm just going to set it to zero.

And then, what I'm going to do, is I'm just going to do a polygon edit on it to make sure that it's closed. It should be. The next step is to do a map export, and we're going to pick a directory that we're going to start saving shapefiles in. Kind of crazy to go from AutoCAD to shapefiles in InfraWorks, but you'll see why we do this in a second here.

So, under my GIS directory, I have a proposed GIS directory here, and I'm going to call this grading extents. And what we're doing here, is we're going to grab that poly line we just made from the surface boundary. I must've set the wrong coordinate system. Bear with me. Oh, I did. There we go. Sorry. So, we'll call this grading extents.

And you'll see why we're doing this in a minute. We're going to select the poly line. We're going to make sure that we treat closed poly lines as polygons, and we're going to hit OK. So, that export a very quickly. So now, in InfraWorks, what we're going to do is we're going to bring in that shapefile. We're going to open this up. We're going to configure that with a coverage area, and we're going to apply a style to that.

And this is how we're going to get our materials on our InfraWorks model. So, if we put on a, say a terrain-- well, we'll do a land cover. Let's go back up. Land cover, there we go. Put on this field grass. It'll contrast with the aerial imagery well. And we'll hit close and refresh.

So now, what we've done, is we basically just draped a giant coverage area on top of our civil 3D grading model, and suddenly, we're starting to see a lot more detail come out. This is sort of the first step in applying materials to your InfraWorks model to visualize it. So, now that we've applied this material, the curb and gutter, these things are starting to stand out to us a bit more.

So, what we need to do now, is we need to create these shape files for pretty much every area of our design that we want to apply a material to. And if you have a trustee, a CAD tech or draftsman who likes doing that kind of thing, this is the time to delegate because this is a bit mind numbing. But give somebody a day, and if they're creative with the way they-- they can do hatching and extract boundaries, and there's a lot of ways you can do this.

But basically, what we're going to end up with-- is I'm going to open this drawing up here-- --is we're going to have a bunch of M polygons or closed polylines. And what I've done, is I've just traced all the line work on the roadway. So, if I click on this X-ref here, that's sort of the X-ref that shows the horizontal layout of the roadway and all the curb islands and whatnot. And these hatched areas are not actually hatches. These are all GIS and polygons.

And what we can do then, is we can export these somewhat individually. So, let's just grab the pavement for now, and we'll do a map export. And we can call this paving. And we'll pick the polygon. We'll select manually. We don't need to convert any coordinates. We can just hit OK.

So now, back in InfraWorks, we can go into our data sources. We can grab that shapefile we just exported as the paving shapefile. We can then configure this with a coverage area type, and we can add a-- well let's use a roadway. Sorry. I think this is a good one. Yeah.

So now, the pavement's coming in. So, as we add these different coverage areas, and we start to configure the styles, we can get the ground to look the way that it's realistically going to look. And it's just going to take a little while to put these all in. One key thing that you need to keep in mind here is the order in which you add them is the order in which they're going to stack. Now, you can change that by just going into the surface layers pane here, picking the things that you've added, so right now you can see the two coverage areas that we've added, and we can push these up and down as need be, basically, to get them to display in the right order.

And it's good to be kind of creative with the way you create these shapefiles. For instance, I want to show the same grass that I'm showing with the grading extents at the same place in the median. That was butchered. So, the way we want to do that is just when we do our map exports, we're leaving gaps where we want things to show through. So, that's the way we're going to use Civil 3D to export shapefiles to configure materials on our terrain.

Now, the shapefile export can extend to things well beyond just terrain coverages. We can do things like we can bring in city furniture using shapefile exports, so we'll do that right now. So, I have a drawing here that has all the streetlights, and these are just blocks. So, what we can do is we can just select similar, grab all the blocks, we can do a map export, and we can call this street lights.

And we now are going to want to export these as points, GIS points. Select manually to pick those ones that we already selected, and hit OK. So now that's done. Back to InfraWorks. Import the shape file. Grab the street lights. Configure these. We'll use a city furniture type here schema, so city furniture, there it is. And then we can apply a style, so there's got be a streetlight in here somewhere. There we go, street lamp. Close and refresh.

One thing you need to do that I forgot to do, is you need to make sure that you're draping these things when you're adding vertical surface features. And if we zoom in, we can see the streetlights have now come in. Now, these are obviously rotated the wrong way. And unfortunately, there isn't really a better way to do this but to just grab them twist them around.

But that's how you could use this same principle to bring in vertical features, fire hydrants, street signs, traffic signals. The sky is the limit, basically, in what you do, but this way you're ensuring that things are coming in the right place. Also, I like to use this technique for bringing in the landscape design. You can just grab the blocks that represent the trees, and you can import them in this fashion.

One super critical thing with this project, obviously, was the sound walls, so we'll do a quick import on a barrier type. So, if we go into AutoCAD again, we can do, under fencing and walls-- and I have all these orange lines here which represent fences, and I have some of these salmon-colored lines which represent the sound walls. If we grab all of these-- and I have them layered currently per the heighth, but for now, we're just going to grab a bunch of them.

And we'll do a map export, and we'll call this sound walls. We can hit OK. And we can now choose a line GIS type, select manually, and we'll head OK. Then, like we've been doing in InfraWorks, open the shapefile. Grab at the sound walls. Open these up. Configure them as a barrier type. We can then add a height in here. We want to make sure that we're draping them, like with the lights.

We can hit Close and Refresh. And now-- oh, I applied a really wacky style here. [LAUGHS] Let's give them a good style, so we'll use a gray barrier style. And we can see that our walls are coming in. I didn't grab all the walls, obviously, but we can see the walls are coming in as they would. Some are realistically, they're kind of stacking along the surface.

Now, in the handout, I talk about bringing in the fence and using custom schema to separate the fence from the walls. There's also a really good description of that in the video recording that's linked the handout, so I'd recommend checking that out. But basically, by using this process, and taking our Civil 3D data out of Civil 3D and into InfraWorks, we can recreate the model. So, I'm going to go ahead and jump into the actual finished model now, and we can take a look at what this looks like after we put some time into it.

AUDIENCE: So--

MIKE SMITH: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: If this was only for [INAUDIBLE] to have the [INAUDIBLE] see, why not use the tools out of the InfraWorks? It can be easier, faster--

MIKE SMITH: Well, the quality of visualization you're going to get-- sorry, the question was, why not just use the InfraWorks standard road type stuff? The quality the visualization you're going to get from that is passable maybe for a very preliminary design, but we wanted to add a bit more detail. So, I think once you see the actual finished model, you'll see the value that we can get by using this methodology.

So, now we're looking at what this looks like after you've gone through, and you spent a day or two adding the data, configuring it, and fine-tuning the model to look the way you want it to look. It's all the same stuff that I just showed you guys. It's the same coverage areas. We've added to the landscape design [INAUDIBLE] the trees.

We've added some cars just as a sort of sense of scale and to show that there's a parking lane here. Street lights, obviously, are all in. Different materials for the equestrian trail, and the sidewalk, driveways, curb cuts, and then, of course, the sound walls and the fences. So, we can look down, and we can see-- Sir?

AUDIENCE: Did you import the housing models?

MIKE SMITH: OK, that's a good question. So, the housing models-- InfraWorks building is basically just a glorified block, and for something that we're trying to convey a little bit more detail, we don't really want to use that just block. So, actually, by default, InfraWorks comes with a bunch of sample house models.

So, if we go under right, and we can go to city furniture, there are several just out-of-the-box building models. And they actually look close enough to the houses that are out there, that we figured, we don't have enough budget to go through it and make custom models of all these houses. But these at least look better than the block rectangles you're going to get out of a Model Builder building.

Some other things you can do to make your model look better is I brought in some much higher resolution aerial imagery. We have a Nearmap subscription. I highly recommend checking those guys out. They have a booth downstairs. They do great work, and you can get some really crisp aerial imagery, which also helps with the quality of your visualization.

So, yeah, this is kind of what we wanted to get as the end product. And like I said in the beginning, it's the appropriate level of detail. It's not just straight InfraWorks designed roads and features. It's got a little extra, but it's not quite that 3ds Max, artist's rendering type quality.

There's a question over there?

AUDIENCE: How'd you get your pavement markings [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE SMITH: That's a great question. So, I will go ahead and open up the striping file, so you can see what that looks like. Let's see. Signage and striping. There we go.

So, the question was, how did we get the pavement markings to come in properly? So, in our striping file, we have a custom line type that has the striping spaced appropriately. I scoured the internet for a LISP routine that would blow up custom line type into discrete line segments, and I was able to find one. And I'll include that with the course materials, that LISP routine.

Basically, what we did then, is I grabbed all those little individual pieces of striping, exported those out as shapefile lines, and then configured those as coverage areas using a buffer. Again, not a lot of time today to go over all this stuff, but it's all in the handout. It's all in the video recording. It would be a good resource for you guys if you're interested in using these techniques to try to come up with some visualization models like these.

We're getting close on time here. We've got a little bit of time left. We can look at a few other things. Are there any other questions that you guys are really interested in, based on what we've done so far?

AUDIENCE: A non-technical question. So, you did all this work to support this vote.

MIKE SMITH: Exactly. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. Right? So one, how was this tool received by the stakeholders? Was it worth doing all this?