What's Beyond InfraWorks 360 LT?

ERIC CHAPPELL: This class is "What's Beyond InfraWorks 360 LT?" My name's Eric Chappell, Community Evangelist for InfraWorks 360. I work for Autodesk.

I've been with Autodesk for about two years, started off in support. And I've always had a great love for InfraWorks, so it was kind of natural for me, when an opportunity opened up to do something specifically with that product, for me to take it. So I have a super, super fun job.

And just going out there and talking to people about this product that I really do love, kind of staked my whole career on it. Wrote books about it. So it's obviously something I'm excited about.

Our learning objectives for today. I'm assuming that some of you have InfraWorks 360 LT and you're interested in knowing what else is out there, and that's why you're here. That's what we're going to cover. I want to be able to explain to you what the differences are, so that you understand maybe what you have and what you could have.

And then we're going to talk about the three major verticals. In addition to some of the collaboration and publishing features that are with InfraWorks 360, not the LT product. So that's what we're going to dig into and really get a deep understanding of what's out there. What you can do.

And I think you'll be happy to know, most of this class is going to be demonstration. Very little PowerPoint. I'm going to welcome questions as I'm working through the software. I don't have any really structured script I'm going to go through. I'm just going to go through the features and show you what they do. So feel free to ask questions.

Our agenda. Which InfraWorks is which? InfraWorks 360 LT versus InfraWorks 360. Then we're going to look at the key InfraWorks 360 features. Model Builder and Collaboration, and the Vertical Applications as I mentioned. And then we'll talk a little bit about preview features as well.

So first off, a couple of slides to get started and then we'll really get into this. So there are two flavors, I'll call them, of InfraWorks out there. There is in InfraWorks 360 LT, you can call that a stripped down, or basic version, of InfraWorks 360. You're familiar with AutoCAD LT versus full AutoCAD. There are definitely feature limitations in the LT version.

Most people have the LT version as part of a suite. Infrastructure Design Suite Ultimate, or Premium, and Building Design Suite Ultimate. Who has InfraWorks 360 LT? All right. Looks like a good, at least, half of you. And just nod your head, is that part of a suite? Is that why you have it? OK. So that's the common scenario.

You can buy it by itself, but most people, they have it as a consequence of owning a suite. So it's a Desktop subscription entitlement. So that means, not only do you have to have Infrastructure Design Suite, it has to be on subscription for you to be entitled to that LT version.

InfraWorks 360 has in it, everything that is in InfraWorks 360 LT plus the Model Builder and Collaboration tools, some simulation and analysis and then other things as well. And then we've got the ability to add on the vertical applications of drainage, bridge, and road. And whatever other future verticals we come up with in the future.

So that's a capability in itself. Something that InfraWorks 360 LT cannot do is accept those vertical applications. So if you're on InfraWorks 360 LT and you want to run the Road vertical, you have to upgrade first to InfraWorks 360, and then add on the Road vertical. So you're paying for one thing, and then another thing, if you're looking at it from a cost standpoint.

And that's often what you're up against as an end user, is convincing the boss that you need to buy this software. And the boss is going to be like, you mean I need to pay twice to get from A to B? And the answer is yes.

Now we're always thinking about better ways of packaging and offering our solutions. So just because this is the structure right now, pay attention to blogs and things that are going on, because that may change in the future. Especially with a product that it is this new. And we're experimenting a lot and learning our way with this new product, which is really different than anything we've ever done before.

So lots of changes happen. In fact, did you guys know that InfraWorks 360 is developed using a program called Agile development? Anyone ever heard of that? It's a development cycle. In the past, traditionally, we would put out a software release once a year. So you really would only have a viable release of software every 12 months.

Well with Agile development, our developers hold to a promise that they're going to have a fully functional piece of software at the end of each sprint. A sprint is a short period of time, it's two weeks or three weeks. So in the past when we only had, really, working software every 12 months, we now have it every two to three weeks. So we're able to really change quickly and be agile with response to what our customers are telling us about what to do.

OK. So let's dig in to some of the features we're talking about. There is one more thing I want to clear up. We did a little name change about a year ago, and I wanted to explain that.

At one time there was a product called InfraWorks and a product called InfraWorks 360. I'm going to try to do this without confusing you. If that doesn't sound familiar to you at all, just tune me out for the next two minutes, because I don't want to add confusion if there isn't any there.

Before last year, what used to be InfraWorks 360 LT was just called InfraWorks. It had no 360 on the name. And then the upgrade product from that was called InfraWorks 360. So we renamed it a bit, and both products now have the 360 in the name. And the lighter one now is LT and the full blown one is just InfraWorks 360. So it's weird. We made the name shorter for the bigger product, and longer for the lesser product. If you were wondering what's the deal with that.

All right InfraWorks 360, we're not talking about the vertical applications right now, we're talking about just the core product, which you can currently buy by itself. And by far, my favorite feature, maybe in the whole program, is Model Builder. Did anyone do the test drive in the booth?

I had the pleasure of running the test drive a fair amount over the last few days. And what we did is we invited people to come up and try out in InfraWorks 360. In fact, let's do it. I would ask them-- I would let them drive and I'd say call up Model Builder, and I want you to type in the name of a town you're familiar with. And I think every single person did the town where they live.

Somebody give me a town name that they're familiar with.

AUDIENCE: Austin.

ERIC CHAPPELL: Austin, Texas? All right. So we're zoomed out pretty far on Austin, I'd like to get into about 10 square kilometers. Guide me to an area that maybe you're familiar with.

AUDIENCE: A little south.

ERIC CHAPPELL: A little south.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

ERIC CHAPPELL: All right, let's try that out. So I'm going to call this downtown Austin. I'm going to select my group, so let's just put it in my default group and click Create Model. I'm going to talk about this in a little more detail than I did during the test drive because my goal there was just to get people to try it and see how awesome it was. And actually, let me do this, let me hit Create Model, and then I'll talk about it. Because we can give it a little time to process while we're talking.

So what I just did is I zoomed in on an area and I sent a request up to the cloud that said, build me a model of this area. And InfraWorks 360 is going to use freely available data from Open Street Maps for roads, buildings, water features. Terrain data came from USGS. And we have Bing imagery. So it's going to pull all that together for me and build a model out of it.

Now if you've ever gone through the pains of trying to gather your own GIS data to build up existing conditions of a project, I mean typical project, how long does that take? Starting from zero and actually finding the data, compiling it, getting the coordinate systems lined, up how long is that take?

AUDIENCE: A few hours or a day.

ERIC CHAPPELL: A day?

AUDIENCE: Six months.

[LAUGHTER]

ERIC CHAPPELL: So I heard a day, I heard half a day. Can anyone do it faster than that?

AUDIENCE: 30 seconds.

ERIC CHAPPELL: You can do it in 30 seconds? So what? You have SITEOPS. Oh, we don't say that word. We don't say that word in here. I'm kidding. Yeah, I'm familiar with that tool. Yep. And it's a good comparison, between the two.

But yeah, if you're going to try to do that on your own, starting with going out and just finding the data, it can take you a while. And it's kind of frustrating, too, because you're having to pull in data with different coordinate systems, they don't always line up. The places you get the data, you don't always know what coordinate system it's in. So there's all kinds of frustrations that go along with that.

AUDIENCE: Quick question. [INAUDIBLE]

ERIC CHAPPELL: It is. Yeah and I had a couple of people-- actually I was surprised. Someone who I thought really knew the software well was surprised to find out that we had global coverage now, and we do. When we started out, it was only the US. But I would say for a year it's been global coverage.

Now there are some extreme areas like above the Arctic Circle, and things like that, that we don't cover.

AUDIENCE: Is this very close to the [INAUDIBLE] that we use?

ERIC CHAPPELL: Say that one more?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ERIC CHAPPELL: I'm not familiar with it, so I couldn't answer that question. Sorry. Thank you. Excuse me one second. Sorry for the interruption. OK.

So I think we agree, doing this from scratch would take a while, right? Surprised it hasn't popped up yet. But I want to talk about some of the options we have up here. So I did the simplest option, which was to zoom into an area, and go with that, with a rectangle.

We can also draw our own rectangle. So if I wanted to just pick out a certain area like that, I could. We can also draw a polygon. So and this is handy if you're doing like a road corridor. You want to do a model along a road corridor, and you just wanted to bring in that data. And we even have the option to import a shape file.

So I could hit that button, go out and grab a shape file, which is in ESRI format. Drop it in. I have a data set that I use for the town of Ashland, which I live near, in Virginia. And went out to the county GIS website, found a data set that had outlines of all the towns and cities and counties. I can drop that in there and carve out, perfectly, the boundary of Ashland. And the shape of my model itself is in the shape of the town, so it's pretty cool.

At the current time there's no-- it looks like you should have choices here with what data you can bring in, but really it's kind of just a static interface. It may be a little bit of a picture into what we're thinking about later on. But for now this is what you get. You get roads, buildings, imagery, and elevation or terrain data.

You can also go to these functions up here and switch between views. There's a bird's eye view, which gives you some aerial-- it's a hybrid of aerial and road and it tilts the view for you. I tend to stick to the road view. To me it's more clear. I can usually go by road names and figure out where I want to be.

All right, so that's Model Builder. And I'm still not seeing my model pop up. Usually it's showing up here long, long ago. So let me jump into this Ashland demo. We'll check on it a little later. Maybe my internet connection isn't as good as I think it is in here. And I'm going to go to the master proposal.

So that's what I was talking about with that shape file carving out. I imported a shape file in Model Builder and it carved out the perfect shape of the town of Ashland right there. So that's the Model Builder part. And then we also have the Collaboration part. So with the Collaboration part-- when you start with Model Builder, it creates the model in the cloud, right from the beginning.

And let me ask you this question. How many of the companies you work in are nervous about the cloud? Yeah we see a lot of that. I've heard people say that they don't want to use InfraWorks 360 because they're scared of the cloud, and security, and that sort of thing.

And compared to other products that are very cloud oriented, InfraWorks 360, I would say, if you take out a typical day when you're using the product. If you're using it to its fullest, you're really only accessing the cloud maybe 5% of the time. Right? Because even though your model is stored in the cloud in order to open it, it does go through a download process.

So it downloads the data, and you work on it. And then when you want to save your changes back to the cloud, you can do that explicitly yourself. It's not like a constant exchange of data that you have no control over. It's something that you control. And the cloud is used as a convenient central storage location. And the data is very secure.

We could get into the standards and that sort of thing. It is not yet FedRAMP certified, but we're working toward that. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. I guess it's a longer, more complicated process than we thought. We've been working on it for several years now. And I think it's not so much about the specs of how we store our data, it's about the process, and getting it done through the government.

With the Collaboration tools, you can take a model, publish it up to the cloud, and then what you do is, you create a group. And that model lives in the group. And anyone you invite to the group lives in the group. And they have access to the model. So that's how the Collaboration piece works. So let me demonstrate some of that to you.

Yeah, there it is. Let's see if we can get that one to open. Now that is going to take a moment to download. Now it usually starts out with a longer time estimation than what it really is going to take. That's going to be pretty quick. Good. Thanks for spotting that.

Yeah usually the models come back in like two minutes. I think we say 10 but it usually comes back in two. But it I guess it depends on how busy the service is, and maybe other services around it that are also processing in the cloud. This is why I love Model Builder, because the data is always right there, you just have to go and grab it. And if I zoom in here you'll see some of what I've gotten.

I've got roads. And these are vector roads, they are not just pictures of roads. And I've got the Bing imagery, as you can see. And in more populated areas I'll get major buildings. Now the facades are applied randomly, so the facades may not look like what they really are.

We've got a stadium here, Texas Longhorns. So that's pretty cool, but I'm sure that's not what the stadium looks like on the outside. But as I learned getting ready for the design slam, you can go out to Trimble 3D warehouse, probably download a model of this stadium, and drop it right in there in its place. And you can just grab this guy and delete him out and drop in your own model of that building.

So it's not like you're stuck with what you get. If there are certain buildings that you'd like to be more representative of what they really are, InfraWorks is an editing tool as much as it is a context tool. So that's how that's how slick Model Builder is.

Since we're in this model, we can talk a little bit more about sharing and collaboration. So because I used Model Builder-- and if you remember when I created the model, I chose a group for it. Right? And it was one called defaultgroup@ericchappell. So ericchappell is my account name, your account name might be the name of your company. I had one created for myself from the product team.

It could be whatever you want it to be. And then within that account, you can create as many groups as you want, as long as you're an administrator in that account.

If I go back to the Home screen, I've got some controls up here that have to do with groups. Let's go to this one first, Manage Group Membership. I'll go to my default group, which I believe these are arranged in alphabetical order. Now I have two accounts here. I have Autodesk support, and I've got my own account.

And then these other accounts that you see are groups that I was invited to, like Jason Hickey who is a coworker of mine. He invited me to a group, so his account is listed here. But I want to find my own default group under my name. For some reason it's not letting me select that group. Bear with me just a second.

Actually I think where I want to go is here. Add users to groups. Here's what we want. So you can see some of the people that I've added to this group in the past. And right now, those folks all have access to that downtown Austin model that I just created.

In fact if, they had InfraWorks 360 open to the home screen? At the same time that tile popped up on my screen, it popped up on theirs, too. Because they have membership in that group. They have the ability to access that data. There are different membership levels.

You can be a publisher, which lets you publish changes to a model that is there, but you can't create new models in the group. You can only publish to ones that are already there. An author can create new models in the group. And a reader can only download the models. You can't even make changes if you're a reader. And that's something we changed recently.

If you're a reader in a group and you download a model, it will actually disable about 80% of your user interface. Anything that allows you to modify the model. In the past we would let you modify it, you just couldn't publish it back up. But we realized there were loopholes around that. You could detach the model, copy it, make changes, and then publish it as a new model.

So now if you're a reader, you're a reader. You can't change that model, even on your local machine. All right, so I can invite anyone I want to that group, just by simply entering their email address. And if they have an InfraWorks 360 account, after I send the invitation, if they're not already a member of the group, under the notification section, which isn't visible right now, because they don't have any, they'll get a notification that says, you've been invited to a group.

And you can actually click on the notification, accept the invitation, and then magically the tiles will appear that are part of that group. So that's a function that you can do with InfraWorks 360, not LT. Something interesting about LT, though, is that if somebody creates a model, they can invite you to a group, and you can download and work on that model. So even if you have InfraWorks 360 LT, and I'll try to pay close attention. I'll try to explain this without being confusing.

If you have all you have is InfraWorks 360 LT, somebody with full blown InfraWorks 360 can create a group, invite you to it, put a model in that group, and you can download it and work on it. Where your capability stops is that you can't publish any changes back up. Because you simply don't have that little sync button up in the top that I showed a moment ago.

But you still have access to the cloud, which is kind of why we changed it to InfraWorks 360 LT. Because you still have access to the 360 services, you just can't publish changes back up there. Even if you buy one copy of InfraWorks 360, full blown, for your office, the other folks who just have LT can still benefit from that, because they can work on the models that are created by, maybe the one person that's the real guru of the product.

So something to think about if you're trying to get more capability, but you can't upgrade everyone all at once. You want to do it a few at a time. Another thing you can do is, you can manage the models in your groups. So again, I'll go into that same group, defaultgroup@ericchappell. And it will show me all the models that I've published to that group. There are quite a few. That's my dump everything group.

And I can go in here and remove them, download them. You don't really, truly delete a model until you get it out of here. If it started there with Model Builder, to get rid of it completely, this is where you want to delete it from. And there is a limit on the amount of space you have, based on your contract. So you want to make sure you don't fill that up and start getting yelled at because you don't have space to store your models. Good maintenance is a good idea with this stuff.

I think that covers Collaboration pretty well. Any questions on any of that? Yes sir.

AUDIENCE: I work in rural areas a lot and with farmers and [INAUDIBLE] and stuff like that. When they download it from the cloud, can I just have it into my computer without having internet access?

ERIC CHAPPELL: Yes you can. Yes you can. So the question was, and let me make sure I get this right. So you create the model using Model Builder. And you want to make it local only? And you want to be able to work on that model without internet access? OK. So a couple of things. First is, by opening that model, you've already downloaded it. So you can't open a model in the cloud, it has to be downloaded.

If you noticed when I clicked on that Austin model, a screen came up and I had to click Download. So that's a requirement. Even though it happens in the background, and most of time I don't even pay attention to where it's saved. So all the data you need is already on your local hard drive. Or you can also save that to a network, now. That's something you couldn't do before.

The other thing is, remember that licensing happens through the internet. So when you open InfraWorks 360, you have to log in. Now if you've just been in it, it'll use a cookie and log yourself in for you. But after 14 days, that causes you to re-log in.

If you're a regular user of InfraWorks 360, and you notice one day it just asked me to log in randomly, you probably just went over your 14 days and it's like, all right, just checking. Just making sure you're who you say you are. So that's your limitation. You can take that model offline, unplug your laptop, and you've got 14 days to run that software until you'll eventually hit a point where it will ask you to log in.

And you're going to have to plug in so that it can go up to the cloud, validate your license, and give you access to the software. That's really your only limitation. Any other questions about Collaboration? Model Builder?

Something else I want to point out with Model Builder is-- I mentioned that you're not just stuck with what you get. You can make changes. You can also add to it. So if you've got better building data, wipe all that out and add your own building data that came from the county. If you've got better imagery, by all means use your imagery.

There is a way to up the quality of the imagery that you get. I'll show you that. If I go here to ground imagery and configure. By default you get about a-- I'll just show you here. Notice that it picked this level 17 imagery quality. That's not quite the best. The best is typically level 19. And it's quite a bit better than what you see there.

It says 2.896 meters per pixel. I'm sorry, 0.2 versus where I'm at now, which is one point something. So it's a fraction of the resolution. But there is a trade off. It's going to take a while to download. You'll get really good imagery, but it's going to take a while to download. Like, go get a cup of coffee, time. OK? But it's worth it if you're willing to wait for that download time.

AUDIENCE: That wouldn't affect [INAUDIBLE] model after?

ERIC CHAPPELL: It depends on your machine. And where you're at, at that point. If you brought in the maximum 200 square kilometers of area, and you're already pushing it, and your fan's running full speed, and you drop in that extra high end imagery, yeah, it's going to affect performance.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ERIC CHAPPELL: Yeah. I mean, there are settings for that, too.

I guess the answer is, it depends. On a lot of factors. What are your settings in the software? What are your machine specs? How big is your model? What other things have you dropped in there? Performance is never a straight answer because there are so many factors.

But it will make a difference, whether it's a noticeable difference or not just depends on those other factors. Any other questions about this? Yes?

AUDIENCE: For a large area like this, [INAUDIBLE] model and then clip out just a small area for a project?

ERIC CHAPPELL: So the question is, can you clip out a smaller area for a project? So let's say you do a whole county, or a whole town. You probably couldn't do a whole county, but say a whole town as a master model. And now you want to go do some work on this part of the town? That is possible. The way you would do it is you would make a copy of the model.

You can do it here. From within the model there's a duplicate command. There's also a duplicate command on the home screen. So you make a copy of the model. And then in the copy you would go into model properties and change the model extent. Right now on using everything, entire model. But you can define a bounding box, almost like an image clip or something like that, where it will restrict the size of your model to whatever area you define.

I don't know that I would do that. Because I think that that big model may get really big and unwieldy. But you could try it, it's worth a try. Especially if you spend a lot of time bringing in Model Builder and then bringing in your own data and fixing things up. One thing about Model Builder is it's free data.

This isn't our data. We didn't provide it. We don't know how good it is in every tiny little corner. And sometimes you'll get a place where a bridge just doesn't form itself quite right. And if it's an important area of the project, you'll want to go in there and fix that, maybe, right? So if you've spent some time doing those little corrections, I could see where you wouldn't want to start from scratch every time. Yeah.

At first I was thinking maybe that's not such a great idea but I'm rethinking that now. Considering that maybe putting other work into that after you've brought it in could be worth having that master model to carve from. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Would you send a proposal option-- would that be another way to approach that?

ERIC CHAPPELL: Not that particular case. So the question was, could you use a proposal to do that? To carve out parts of the model? The model extent arches over all your proposals. So if you change the model extent, it'll change it in every proposal in your model. What's interesting about that is, two years ago that wasn't the case. Model extent was unique to each proposal, and we changed it at some point.

It was probably for better performance, or more efficient data storage. Something like that. Because I'll tell you, the size of an InfraWorks 360 model has gone down by about 90% since we started. I mean, they used to be big monsters. Six, seven gigabytes. Anyone remember that? And now, the same model that was six or seven gig is now 250 megabytes.

So we've really learned how to store data more efficiently. And I think doing that was part-- part of the solution is that we don't store everything in every proposal. We try to share what's common across multiple proposals. So that was a really long answer to, I could have just said no. Good. One more question?

AUDIENCE: Yes. Regards to performance. Does InfraWorks use a GPU to speed up rendering?

ERIC CHAPPELL: Oh you're asking the wrong guy about computer hardware. I really don't know. It's one of those things I just don't store in my head. I know guys that can rattle off every detail of that, and I'm not one of them, unfortunately. So I'm sorry I can't answer that question. All right, let's move on to the verticals. And just doing a time check here, used about 30 minutes. That's good.

As I mentioned, InfraWorks 360 has the capability of adding in three, currently, verticals. And you can see them shown here. This brown icon is Roadway Design. The purple one is Bridge Design. And the light blue one is Drainage Design. We call this within Autodesk this is the mustache icon.

These extend the capability of InfraWorks amazingly. I mean, we're not just talking a little bit of additional functionality. These are programs in themselves. So let's talk about Roadway first. And a good place to start with Roadway is, what about the road tools in the core product?

So this orange icon, by the way, is the core product. That all you own is in InfraWorks 360 LT, you're going to have that orange icon. In fact, I want to mention this, too. This is an aside, but I want to mention it while I'm thinking about it. If you've got someone, maybe a client, or someone in your project that's working with you, or has a stake in the project, and you want to show them your InfraWorks 360 model, all you have to do is tell them to go out and download the trial.

By default, that install is a free viewer of InfraWorks 360. You can invite them to your group, and they can open your model. They don't even have to launch the trial. In fact, I would-- anyone from Autodesk in here? I would tell them not to. Because of the complexity. If all they want to do is view your model, and they're not interested in ever buying it ever, then don't even activate the trial.

Because they're going to get a lot of extra buttons that are not going to mean anything to them. When you use it as the viewer, you get a very simple user interface. It's like five buttons. And you can invite him to the group, they can download that model, open it up and look at it. They can take measurements. They can play your storyboards. All kinds of stuff.

So it's a useful tool if you want to share your model with people. And because of the cloud, you don't have to e-mail them anything. You don't have to put it on a hard drive and mail it to them. You just invite them to the group. All right.

So Road Design. Start with what Road Design looks like in the core tools. So I'm going to click the little pencil icon here. And we've got a roads tool here, so I'll click that. Choose a style. And I'm just going to play around in Austin here and do some development. Is that a cemetery?

AUDIENCE: Yep.

ERIC CHAPPELL: Yeah, we don't want to develop there. I've seen "Poltergeist." I'm not going there. So we've got maybe a little bit of green space here, we might need to take out some residential area. I'm just going to put a road from here over to here. And let me put a little curve in it.

All right. Now this is coming from the core tools. And I just want you to make a mental note of, when I click on this road, look at what the gizmos look like. Those are the little symbols here in the corners that kind of look like AutoCAD grips. These I can use to manipulate what I've designed.

Notice their color. There's only one on the corner. I don't have any control over the curve itself. The curve just is some magical formula. It's actually a spline. So this is what we call a planning, or a sketch, road. There's not a whole lot of control. But there is some.

I can raise things up. I can go into the style and kind of control this side slopes. But I'm limited, really, as to what I can do. And the things I can do are designed for somebody who doesn't know anything about, or care about, civil engineering. So there's no concept of a horizontal curve, or vertical curve, or any of that. Or real slopes, like three to one, two to one.

These roads don't think like an engineer thinks. They're more for representation and showing an image of the road that you can say, hey I'm thinking of putting a road here. Now let's do instead, a Design road. Now I'm going to go to the road design tools. Click the pencil icon. There's a lot of consistency in the user interface. And now I see some different tools.

I see tools that are classified by use, from local to collector, to arterial, to highway. And the difference between these tools is design speed. They each have a built-in design speed. And you can override it if you want. But the design speed dictates how the geometry is going to be laid out by default. And that is based on, right now, AASHTO standards.

You can go in and customize that. So if you're not doing work in the United States, you can customize it for other standards. Right now it's a hack, but it's totally doable. And there are country kits out there, too. I know there's one for the UK where you can and you can introduce the UK standards into this. And the numbers are going to just increase on that. You're going to get more and more possibilities for standards.

So now I'll do the same thing. I'm going to use local road here. It's the same styles. I can choose from the same list of styles. I'll even pick the same one. And I'll do the same thing. I'll start on this road. Pick a point over here for a curve. Notice the different graphics right off the bat, right? There's definitely something different going on here.

And this is a bad intersection because of the angle, but I'll go ahead and go with it. Now it automatically detected that I have a crossing over water. And I also have the Bridge vertical entitled. So it's asking me, hey, there's going to be a bridge here what style do you want to use? And I'm going to go with concrete girder.

All right. So now I've got this road. And it just functions a little bit differently. Can see it cut into the hillside. It's got, if I click on it, look down. You can see I've got a lot more gizmos to control the geometry. This curve is an actual horizontal curve. If I click on it, I get a radius, which I can edit.

I can even go to edit curve and add some spirals. If I want a more complex solution. That's interesting. That's why you gotta love demo, right? So I can also turn this down on its side. And you guys probably know this about InfraWorks already, but if I'm looking down on an object, I get different gizmos than if I change my view perspective.

I mean, that's almost too easy. That's unfair. I don't even have to do anything, except look at it from a different angle. It's better. So obviously I've got a really deep cut here, so I can add a PVI. It comes, by default, with a vertical curve which I can lengthen if I want. And then I can also modify this PVI. I can move it up and down, I can move it forward and backward, along the alignment.

And now I'm thinking like a civil engineer. If you gave all these tools to somebody who really didn't understand civil engineering, they'd be like, what's a PVI? I don't know what that is. Why do I care how long this curve is? Things like that.

Now I didn't really pick the greatest place for this road, so why don't we do something like this? Instead of intersecting with this road, I'm going to cross over it and, I don't know, do something silly like that. And we'll lift the road up over-- live demo ladies and gentlemen.

I don't know why it's not letting me add a PVI there. Let's try here. Interesting. All right let's go a little further. It might not like all these intersections. This may not be pretty, but we're going to get it done. No kidding. Sorry about that. Well one of the great things about InfraWorks 360 is how quickly it opens after you've done something that it didn't like.

It does use a completely different data structure than Civil 3D. Oh it's not going to like this model now. Dang. Sorry about that. Well I wish I had time to troubleshoot, because I'd love to show you like how to get around doing that, but I'm already 45 minutes into my session. So I'm going to jump back over to that Ashland model, I think.

Well, it saves constantly. It's a database. It's a SQLite database. So it's saving constantly as you go. Notice I never have to hit save. If you want to do that trick where you do a bunch of work, and you're like nah, I don't like that. I'm just going to close without saving. No, you can't do that. So that will get you sometimes.

So what you can do is create a proposal. I want to remember this place right here. I'll create a proposal, and then I'll go do work in another proposal, and then I can always restore that one to get back. And that's why I always keep my master proposal, that's like layer zero. There's always a master proposal.

And a lot of people will jump right in and just start going to town on the master proposal. I like to, immediately, first step, create a new proposal and work in that. That way I can always go back to master as my existing condition starting point.

AUDIENCE: So if you run into a problem like you just did with that [INAUDIBLE] model, how do you get back to that master?

ERIC CHAPPELL: Well the first thing that I would have to do is troubleshoot why I'm getting the error. And that involves getting into some of the files and trying to find the problem file, and correcting it. The other thing I can do is, I never published my changes, so I could-- there's an older version of that model up in the cloud, so I could remove the local version and re download the cloud version, and start from there. That's also an option.

There's a couple of different-- you know how it is, there's always 10 ways to skin a cat. Yeah. And it gets really bad, I'll just send it to the product team, because they love trying to figure out how to crack those puzzles. All right. So let's do a little work here in this opening.

So I do the same thing. I'll do my local road. I really like that style, that's the one I typically use. And we'll just kind of snake through this little forest here. Tie-in. And I'm double clicking at the end to tell it then I'm finished with the command.

One thing that it does, it did well here, is that automatically defined my intersection. Cleaned it up for me. Over here, not so good, but it's probably about where I placed my landing point. So I'm just going to move that over there a little bit.

I may need to do a little work here to get this all to work together, but another thing I've got going on, and I didn't show you this earlier, is if I do start out, or someone else starts out, with one of these planning roads.

Let's say someone only has LT. They don't have access to the full vertical. So they use the tool they have. They go in and they create a road. And just real quick, I'll drop one in here. And now I'm the heavy duty designer. So I get this model from them.

And this is the road they've laid out for me. And it's a planning road, or sketch road. No problem. I can right-click and convert that to a design road. And now I've got a road that has horizontal and vertical curves, and all the engineering things that we talked about, including a profile view.

All I did was I right clicked on one of the PVI's and said show in profile view. This is 100% engineer speak now, right? We're in engineer world where we're editing PVI's. You can see it moving in the model as I move it up and down in the profile view.

I can also move them horizontally, which is something you can't even do in Civil 3D.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the data [INAUDIBLE]

ERIC CHAPPELL: The question was, the data that came in from Model Builder, will it have profiles too? The answer is no. The only way you can get a profile of a road is if it's a Design road. If I wanted a profile of this existing road over here, I would have to first convert it to a Design road, which we saw is really easy. And once I do that, actually the profile should pop right in here because it's already selected.