AutoCAD Civil 3D Visualization in 3ds Max, InfraWorks, or Navisworks

PAUL KIRKENDALL: Well, I'm going to get started. So welcome to hump day of Autodesk University. We made it to Wednesday. So my name is Paul Kirkendall. I'm going to go through visualization from simple 3D in a Infraworks, Max, and Navisworks.

I'm going to go through some of the ways to get your visualization to look pretty nice in all three also, depending on what it is. However, I'm not going to go super deep. It's pretty basic stuff in each one. And then, hopefully by the end of the day, you'll know which one I use for what project, and why do I use that, and in what area or what phase, I guess, would I use that in each software.

But I'm Paul Kirkendall. I'm an Application Engineer at MasterGraphics. I have been there for almost five years. I came from the field, before that, working for a company that did a lot of municipal stuff. No visualization, but I did roads mainly for municipal, lot of GIS.

Went in the survey department for a little while. And then I took them from Land Desktop to Civil 3D, so the transition between those two. And now at MasterGraphics, I've been working a lot with the Wisconsin DOT, getting their transition and helping them with their training and stuff as well.

So I don't need to go through that, you guys read that when you signed up. So general expectations for today are going to be to get the visualization and get the actual data or the geometry from one software to another. Civil 3D to whatever software we're going to be at the time.

Beginner-ish level class, need knowledge of AutoCAD, Civil 3D, kind of the whole suite essentially, which is a collection now. Silence your phones if you could, and hold questions to the end. I'm going to power through this. It's a lot of stuff we're going to go through and how we get to each one. So hold your questions for the end, and I've got prizes to give away for good questions at the end. So you'll want to ask some good ones.

At the end to class today, you're going to learn how to bring data from Civil 3-D into Max, from Civil 3-D into Navisworks, from Civil 3D into Infraworks. And if I have enough time at the end, if I get too excited and talk too fast, we're going to go through some other stuff in maybe Infraworks and Navisworks going back the other way. And then, how to decide what platform is right for what project, and why you need to use it, and what you can get out of each one.

So to start it off, what questions do you need to have before your project starts and why you need to visualize something. What type of visualization is going to be required? Are you on going on municipality or are you going to a DOT?

Who are going to be in front of? What are you going to try to convey? Do you need that visualization to be in super high def quality, walk through. Like you're driving the car and it looks like you're actually driving the car in that scene. Or is it a pretty basic super fast visualization that just gets your intent to your client?

And what's your budget? How long can you spend on each one? If you go to 3ds Max, you're going to spend more time to get a nicer product. If you go to Infraworks, it's going to be less time. If you're in Navisworks, well, maybe you're not going to do a visualization, you're going to do a time-liner for your phasing. So I mean you're 3/4 done with the project, halfway done with the project, depending on where you're at, and you can phase it. So just depending on your budget and how much you can spend on it.

What object data should be designed before you export it? So depending on which one you're in, if you're Infraworks, you can go to Infraworks first then bring it in. Or what we're going to do today is go the other way.

So what we need is the existing surface. Alignments and profiles, you could use feature lines as well. There are some pretty cool extraction tools now that you can extract that stuff. The corridor we're going to use in a couple of them. Pipe networks, parcels are optional. I did a partial export and I'll show you how to do that. Works pretty slick in Infraworks. And then proposed grading surfaces are optional as well.

So we'll bring all that stuff in. I don't want to go to that one yet. So I'm going to go live for the rest of this period, so hopefully everything goes well. Dealing with the software I'm dealing with, I have parts saved so hopefully it doesn't go bad. But here we go.

So in Civil 3D, I have a project built out. Phase 1 of this big development that we're going to do. Phase one actually-- I'm going to switch here. There we go. There we go.

So phase one of this project has my surface. So I got this existing surface in here. I have a corridor. I have a surface on my corridor. Or I have some pipe networks going on. I have surfaces for my corridor and I'm going to bring that stuff out.

So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this thing to Max. How do I bring it to Max? To bring it to Max, I need to go to the Output Tab and there is an export for 3ds Max. There's also, on the Toolbox of your prospector, there is in the Subscription Extension, there's an extension for Civil View that came out as an additional pack this year, or for yeah for this year. And that is going to do an export for the pipe network and alignments.

I'm going to bring in the corridor, because I want the materials from my corridor. I don't want to have to reassign materials. And if I have good materials in my corridor from Civil 3D, I don't have to reassign those right away.

So if I want to bang, bang, get this thing out and have it looked pretty nice. I can do that with the corridor, instead of going into 3ds Max and applying a bunch of materials which takes longer. If I want to do it I can still, but I don't have to.

So either option. I'm going to use the export to 3ds Max on top here. In here it's going to tell you what it's going to bring in and why. And in the handout I showed where there is a little warning symbol. So if your corridor is out of date, it hasn't been rebuilt in a while, it's not going to let you import it. It has to be fresh. It has to be rebuilt and up to date. And then it will let you bring it in. And then that little warning will go away and look like this.

So once you do that, go ahead and click Export. It's going to give me a VSP 3D file. That 3D file I can open up in what's called Civil View. In 3ds Max, which comes with 3ds Max now. So Civil View allows us, as civil engineers, to try to be visualization specialists in Civil 3d-- or in Max. So it helps the process.

So I'm going to go and save that. And it's going to go through. And in mine, I've gotten a few errors where things aren't connecting for the feature lines for my assembly. I haven't actually seen where it's an issue. So I'm not going to worry about it because everything looks pretty good visually.

Well, you'll see here when it gets done, there's going to be a few errors that pop up. To me it's not a big deal because I don't see an issue. It's not design, it's visualization. It looks good, we're good.

But I guess some link sequence-- and I'm guessing that it's because I have two roads side by side. Because I wanted to do materials for my main road, and the materials for my bike lane that I did. And so I separated them as two different ones, instead of having it go the full width.

Now I can get separate materials for each instead. And I think that links because they're the same name, it just doesn't understand that they shouldn't cross and it's erroring out. But like I said visually it's not going to do anything different.

So I have a file and go to 3ds Max. Oops. Open up Max here. Normally I'd have them all open, but I don't want to open them all up and then [LAUGHING] have some issues here.

So in Max there is a Civil View tab up here. If I clicked on that Civil View tab, I'm going to have to start Civil View. There is an option in here, once you start Civil View it's going to initialize. Once it initialises, s you can save it so it won't initialize every single time you open up max now.

I set it to manual, so it's going to initialize each time and then I can set my country units. So you'll have a UK country kit, and then a US country kit, or imperial, metric. I can't remember if there's an Australian one or not. But there's like five different country kits in there that you can set that to for your units right away, and then you don't have to redo it again.

So if I start it,it's going to initialize. When you first do it, on the first one, it's going to make you restart 3ds Max. Then I can go back up to Civil View and I have my three options in here. You've got Civil View. The Civil View explorer is where I'm going to have most of my work done, but initially, my geometry import is were I have to go and find that VSP file that I saved from Civil 3D.

So from there, I'm going to bring in this VS-- You'll find it, and then it's going to show what I can bring in, depending on what it is. Now if you have separate regions-- so if you have an intersection that's going to have a ton of regions in here that are going to try to come together.

I only did one main road, so it's only one region. So I don't have to separate it out. I can bring in as this whole entire region.

You also see that there are networks that I can bring in. So pipe networks, surfaces, alignments, and sites and corridors. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the corridors. I'm going to select all this, check it, go to my surfaces, make sure my surfaces are checked.

I'm going to do the existing ground and the surface. I'm only going to bring them in to show you that I can come in. I'm going to turn them off once I get there.

The other thing that I initially was going to do, but I'm not going to do now. It's in my document on how to bring in the aerial and map it to the surface. [INAUDIBLE] I'm not going to go over that in the class at least.

But you can also apply a material to it. So you can get away from the aerial, and say, I want a material to be on my surface that's just going to be some super longer grass, so it looks visually nice. So I got them all checked and we go ahead and click OK.

It's going to do a global import shift. And I've seen two different things happen here. Sometimes it's going to do a different global shift each time you bring it in. Sometimes it's going to be the same global shift. So it's something that it's calculating on its own.

Consistently, in my file, it's been the same. If you re-import on top of something, it is dynamically linked back and forth, so you don't have to worry about that shift changing because you linked to it. However, you got to keep that in mind. It might move on you, which essentially doesn't matter, because in Max you're not really geolocated anyways.

And then you'll get a feature interpretation styles. Allow, Yeah, I will. And it will take a few moments. It will bring that in. Surface will come in, the corridor will come in. Surface looks kind of funky just because it doesn't have anything mapped to it. So if you have a JPEG of your surface, export it out. You can bring that in. You cannot bring in a SID file or a TIFF file.

However, if-- and this is just an extra one, if you go to Infraworks and you FBX out or IMX out, actually I think it's FBX, if you FBX out your surface, that surface is going to come out with a whole folder full of your JPEG image squares that you can put together, and map it as a JPEG in here.

Which takes a while, but you can do it. Got a little Raster Design. If you know how to use Raster, you can map those things together, and then put them in.

So I'm going to go ahead and click on the servers. I'm going to turn that off. So now I just see my corridor here.

I've got a surface in here also, so I'm going to turn that one off. And now I have my materials from my corridor. And this is because I set it in my code set style. So my code set style had those materials already mapped to it.

It looks pretty nice. Now, like I said, I could not bring in the corridor and map these through the materials in Max. But why would I want to do that when I already have these and they look pretty nice. Now if I need some super photo realistic stuff, well maybe then I take the extra half hour and start mapping all these.

So now, I have everything in here. I'm going to go back up to Civil View, and I'm going to make some road stripes. And then I'm going to bring in some furniture. I'm going to call it furniture.

In Infraworks it would be furniture as well, but I'm going to bring in some light poles. And then we're going to bring in some cars. I'm going to animate the cars. And you can see how fast that we can get this thing out the door.

So I'm going to go to Civil View. I'm going to go to Object Placement. Actually, I'm going to go to the road marker's first. In the road markers, I'm going to go ahead and add a new element. And in there I have to essentially, pick what I want to add this marker to.

So I'm going to go pick shape label. It's going to let me go out to the drawing and I can pick on my label here. I want it to be my Civil 3D baseline. So what I ran into was a small little issue, where because I wanted to quantities in another file, I have pavement here and then I have pavement here because of the quantities.

The bad part is, I got I got three crowns. So if I select my crown and I put my road markings on there. I'm going to have three road markings because it's wrong one. So I had to bring in a separate feature line or the alignment, either one. So that it's separate and it's not the crown. Otherwise, I could just do the crown for the center line, if I just had one.

So I got my feature line. And you can see, that's where it's showing the crown here. So that's the wrong one. So if I map my road markings, it's actually going to show up as all three, which I don't want.

So I'm going to try to select the correct one here. Hopefully it will let me. Otherwise we're just going to go with the one that I got. Might not let me here. We're going to go with it. This morning it let me find that alignment. But it's not working for me today. So anyways, we're going to pretend like I have the right one.

So I'm going to do the road markings. Right now, the width, and the mark length, and the gap length, and then there's a center gap, so where it's going to show up. I'm going to put in a width of 0.3. Mark length is good. The center gap is going to be 0.1. Center gap's going to be 0.1.

And then my color, I'm going to make that yellow. So you got 225, 183, and 0. So now I got yellow. Zero. Click Apply. Yeah. So this morning I was running this issue too. I'm not sure why it's not coming to the top.

So I'm going to move on to the cars here. Once you have that road marking, you can save these styles so you can bring them forward, and I don't have to redo them over, and over, and over again. So if I have this saved as my stripes or whatever, I can save it. And then if I go back up to my Civil View road markings essentially, I can open that style, and say I want that style. And now it's going to apply that style to whatever I have picked.

So moving on. I'm going to put some light poles on this thing. So I have to go back into Civil View. I'm going to do what's called an Object Placement Style Editor. So if I go in here. I'm going to add a new element.

And then I have a bunch of categories in here. On the bottom, I have vehicles, furniture, trees and plants, signs, cameras, and primitives. So all these things I can add to certain objects in here. I'm going to go ahead and go to the furniture, and I'm going to add a light pole. I got a 30 foot single column light pole that I'm going to add to side of the road.

So I click on that. That populates up here on the top. And then I can put in how I want it to show up. And what I want and show it up-- or what I want it to show up on. So I want to parent shape. If I click on the parent shape. Again, it's going to come out to my model.

And I have it shown to show up on my crown or my center line alignment, and then I can offset that from there. I could also pick-- let's say I want it to show up off of my back of curb. So if I go parent, back of curb, or top, and then I can just offset that a couple of feet instead of 30 feet.

So now if I go multiple, regular interval. My horizontal offset, I'm going to go, let's say two feet. And my interval, I'm going to keep at 200 feet and that is interval in between each one. So if I hit apply, now I can see those poles and it looks like it's going to the other side.

So now if I go ahead and change that offset to maybe four. Let's try negative four. 2 and 1/2 and then I can rotate it 180. Now we have our poles running down the road.

So now if I copy this-- I want them on our side of the road too, go ahead and copy, paste. Now I have these on the other side. Now I just need to flip them. So this, I'm going to go 50. I don't need a rotation. If I hit Apply, then it's going in the other side.

So let's go 45. And there I have poles on the other side too. So running down the whole thing, I've got poles at intervals.

AUDIENCE: Would there be a quick way to stagger the opposite side? [INAUDIBLE]

PAUL KIRKENDALL: If I use the different-- if I use the different feature line, I could stagger. The question was, can I stagger it, and if I use the different feature line, so if I went and picked another feature line, instead of using the same one, I could stagger that. So I would create another object placement. I wouldn't copy and paste, because the copy and paste is going to marry the two together for the parent shape.

So then my spine object count would be 1. Go ahead and click OK. I've got a current style. I'm going to say that style. And again, I can save that out so I don't have to repeat this stuff. So I'm going to keep it in my project folder. Save it, I can bring it back.

So next, what I want to do is, I'm going to back in to Civil View and I'm going to add cars to this. So I'm going to go Civil View, object placement. This time I am going to add a new element and I'm going to pick cars. Now I want, not just one car to kind of repeat itself over, and over, and over, and over, I want different iterations of each car in here, and go in different directions. I want traffic to move across.

So I want to pick my parent shape. Pick that again. That crown is being stubborn today. But anyways, so I'm going to go and I'm going to pick my longitudinal placement is the important one. I want random stations, . Number one and I also want, in my other options, to use random objects from the selected category. So that select a category is going to be cars, in this case.

And it's going to randomize those cars as it sees fit. So if I go ahead and click on those cars and then check this use random. My horizontal offset, depending on where I'm at and what feature line or alignment I pick. As you can see, I can offset and figure out where that needs to be depending on what I pick.

So that one is going to be, we're going to try to go with what I had originally, six feet. I don't need a vertical offset. I'm going to go ahead and ply. And this is going to take a few seconds depending on how many randomize cars. If I put more than 20 for the count, it's obviously going to take longer for it to calculate.

You can see the little green progress bar and then I have my cars on the wrong side of the road. So for some reason everything is going opposite for me today. I don't know.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHING]

PAUL KIRKENDALL: Maybe it is. That's it. I hit the wrong one. I'm driving on the left side of the road. So I was supposed to do that.

So now if I go ahead and copy and paste it again, I'm going to have that and other random cars, and then I can flip it to the other side. One thing that I ran into, when I first started doing this, is that miles per hour has to be opposite also. Otherwise, the traffic is going to go the same. So both sides of the road are going to fly down the same way.

So you've got to put a negative in the mile per hour too. Not just the offset. So in here I have my negative 20. It's multiple random stations. I need this to be negative 6. And then the miles per hour here is going to be negative 67.

I'm going to go back up and make sure I got this one at 67. I would put 80 but I don't want to get in trouble. Hit Apply. It's going to create that vehicle animation, so to speak. Or what it's supposed to do.

AUDIENCE: I don't like how it re-randomizes every time you hit Apply.

PAUL KIRKENDALL: It does re-randomize every time you hit Apply. So if you got a huge corridor, you're going to be chugging along after a while here. So you got to be careful. That's why I'm doing Max first. because it's about the only one that's going to super crash.

And now I've got them going in the bike path too. So I picked on the wrong center line and that crown, is just giving me issues and I really don't know why. But if you pick the right feature line, it's going to fly down the right way. Now, like I said earlier, you can save these out.

So if I already had one saved to my alignment and it looked good, I can go up to my open-- I don't want to save that one-- and I'm going to open up my traffic. If I open up that line, you see that-- no that one is going to go on the crown too. So let's see. we're going to hit Apply. We're going to go through and see what happens with this one. So it's going to re-randomize, like he said earlier. And couple minutes or a couple of seconds here, it's going to re-randomize those cars. Hopefully, we can get them going in the right direction.

I can see the one thing that I didn't do in the first one, was I put a rotation on the first ones and the second ones I didn't. So you want to rotate those cars. So not only do you have a negative offset, you've got a negative miles per hour, and then you've got to rotate them so that they're looking in the right direction so that everybody's not driving backwards. Kind of like when you're a kid you are driving in when you're in a station wagon and you're sitting in the back you're looking at it behind you. I make myself old.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHING]

PAUL KIRKENDALL: So now they're going in the opposite direction. Now, if I just go ahead and hit play for my-- well, let's hit OK first. Yep. And if I just hit play for the animation, you see how that are going to go. And that's what I need it to do.

And for visual effect, if I wanted to show a camera path that's going to go down the center line-- and this one I saved out, so I know it'll work. But I'm going to stop this for a second. So I can bring in a camera path that I have already saved. And that camera path is going to be right at somebodies visual reference inside a car, but you're on the center line. So when you're riding down the center line with this camera path as the cars are going past.

AUDIENCE: You just need to add barrels in a construction zone.

PAUL KIRKENDALL: Perfect. And you're good to go. I was supposed to do that too.

So now I can add a camera path. Same deal, I'm going to go to Civil View. I'm going to go-- and this time I'm going to go to explorer. So this is the explorer, this is where all your information is going to be when you need it after you put it in.

I can go to my shapes. And in my shapes, if I pick on the baseline, and then I want to right click on this main line here, and I'm going to apply object placement style to that. So this is a different way to do it, instead of going and picking.

So I see two times that I got screwed up because it picked up on the wrong feature line, because I have three crowns. And then it ended up offset in the wrong place. Well, if I don't want it to do that, I can purposely go in here and select my real true baseline. Right click on it and say Apply object. And it's going to apply it to that actual center line instead of trying to figure out which one I can pick.

So I want that to be my parent shape. Now that one's going to show up in my parent shape, and that one is actually the right one. And then I'm going to add something that I already created.

So in here I have a camera path at 60 miles per hour. It's already set, so I can go ahead and open that. Click Apply. Click OK. And then, now at the beginning of this, I'm going to see I have a camera path sitting here.

Now if I hit C to get the camera path-- so C is kind of your shortcut to get to your camera path. If you have multiple camera paths, you have to hit C a few times, it'll get to that eventually. And now I can ride my roller coaster of camera path animation.

Now if I had a lot more time left for my class after I'd do everything else, I could bring this into VR and show that in a VR set up through Stingray too. Not that I'm going to go through that, but you have that option to export it now right away into VR/AR. Off the road I go.

AUDIENCE: Does it loop automatically or [INAUDIBLE]?

PAUL KIRKENDALL: I don't think it's going to loop for me. No. It's going to hit the end and we're going to stop.

AUDIENCE: There's a way to do it.

PAUL KIRKENDALL: Oh, it does. I lied. So that's 3ds Max. Do I have any questions on that? I'm going to move on next to go to Infraworks, and then we're going to do Navisworks.

AUDIENCE: So basically, what you did was you had a corridor surfaces [INAUDIBLE] exported into 3ds and then were able add all these features into your corridor [INAUDIBLE] whatever it is. Right?

PAUL KIRKENDALL: So in conclusion, he's saying that what I did is I took my corridor, my surfaces, I brought that into Max. I applied a bunch of objects so that I could animate that scene, and yeah, that's exactly what we did.

AUDIENCE: I came in late.

PAUL KIRKENDALL: It's all good. So it's a super fast way to do it, instead of starting from scratch and Max. You could also bring in an FBX from Infraworks. So if you're already using Infraworks, you can bring that FBX from Infraworks too. And there's different things that can be applied in the same way. Just depending on the visualization that you want.

AUDIENCE: If you bring the FBX into Infraworks, does that come through Civil View or [INAUDIBLE]?

PAUL KIRKENDALL: The FBX, you would import as an FBX, so it would not come through Civil View, it would be separate. Yup.

AUDIENCE: And pretty much everything you just did was through the Civil View.

PAUL KIRKENDALL: Everything I did was through the Civil View option, yes. So I'm going to close that out. We're going to go into the Infraworks export. So I got Civil 3D, I want to bring that back into Infraworks.

Traditionally, you're going to see everybody is going to bring Infraworks, , and start, and go into another software. I'm going to go backwards. I'm going to pretend that-- I'm actually going to start in Infraworks. We're going to grab a bunch of the data and then I'm going to go backwards from Civil 3D and bring that stuff back.

So I'm halfway or 3/4 through a project, and now somebody is like hey, I want to see what that looks like. How do you do that? That's what I'm going to do. Instead of starting at the presentation side, where I got conceptual design. Well, it's not conceptual anymore. I've got this thing almost built, except for it's not actually in construction yet.

But my stakeholder wants to see what it looks like. So I can quickly go ahead and say look, this is what it looks like. It's not 3ds Max, but it's going to look pretty good really fast so.

So I'm going to go and I'm going to start in Infraworks first. I'm going to get the data through the model builder. So I'm going to go to Infraworks 360. Open that up. Infraworks 360 comes with the collection now, if you have collections. There's some goofy stuff that went on with the suites, so it was separate for a little while.

So in the model builder, if you haven't used Infraworks before, you can go into model builder. You can select an area in here, bring in the data. That's going to bring in roads, buildings, imagery, and terrain. It's also going to bring in rail, and it's going to bring in waterways. So depending on what type of water, it'll bring in rivers. It will bring in streams. It will bring in lakes.

My little area, this subdivision, is actually in my little tiny town in Randolph, Wisconsin. So there isn't a whole lot of buildings in there, because I'm way in the country. But once you select your area, you put a name to it. Add a group. Whoever's on that group can be added to it and see that data.

Create the model. Models going to take, in this case, it took four minutes. The more populated of an area, so you take downtown Chicago or you take downtown Las Vegas, it's going to take maybe 10 15 minutes to get that model to shoot up to the cloud. Just because there's a lot more data.

So once you do that, you're going to get a thumbnail here. I'm going to pop open that thumbnail. It's going to download locally, initially. You can download that to your network, or wherever you'd like to download it to.

And then you get this. So this is what I want to start out with because it was super fast. I mean, even if I didn't have this model, it would have took five minutes, maybe six to totally download it locally. And then I could start visualizing with it, instead of trying to find stuff that I didn't have. Or if I had a SID file, I try to bring that stuff in. This is just faster. And it's geolocated.

So here's my little area. In here is where the subdivision is going to go. So now I can bring in different types of information that I have already built and Civil 3D. So I have these roads. I'm going to connect to this road, and that is going to connect over right here. And then I've got different phases I can bring in if I wanted to show that to you.

So let's say the stakeholder wanted to see, initially he wants to see a drive-through. What is it going to look like, just the road? And then, what is it going to look like once we put some houses in the subdivision? So kind of a marketing plan.

And then, what is it going to look like once the parcels are there? And I want to see the parcels in relationship to everything else for each phase. So we can do all three of those really fast.

So in here, I'm going to go to the Infraworks icon. I'm going to go to my data sources. And then I'm going to bring in my Civil 3D drawing straight from Civil 3D. I don't have to export anything or do anything fancy. I can just hit Import. Go to my project. And I'm going to bring in the corridor. Same file I had in Civil 3d.

So I have the corridor built. I have the surfaces built. Sometimes the surfaces will give you issues. They'll try to do some funky triangulation in here. So you want keep that in mind, that I have this corridor top surface that I don't want. Because it's going to do some funky stuff. I put that in the document, as how it actually tried to triangulate all these roads and surfaces together. And it just doesn't work very well. So you've got to be careful.

So I'm going to not bring that in. I'm going to bring in the existing ground. It's the same as this anyways, so I don't have to. Actually I'm not going to.

But you can see in here, I have my pipe networks. So I can bring in my pipe networks and show those visually too. So if they wanted to see how that stuff is going to get put in and where it's going to be. It comes in automatically.

So I have my roads and my drainage. Click OK. And then I need to configure it. So in here the one thing I want to configure is going to be my roads. If I click on that, hit configure.

And I have multiple values. I'm going to go ahead and click Close and refresh, because I did all of them at the same time. So if I just pick one, right click Configure. It's going to configure just that road.

So it shows me what the road is. It's going to automatically know what type it is based off of what it it's reading. I'm going to go to Civil 3-D and make sure that it's going to do the two alignments that I have. So I did do an intersection in here, so the cool part is it's going to automatically create an intersection. I don't have to bring the whole corridor in if I don't want to.

So I'm going to do that. On common, I need to pick a road style. So if I pick a road style here, I created a road style specific for this, so it looks just like the corridor. So I don't have to bring the corridor in. I got my lane. I got my bike lane. I've got curving gutter sidewalk and it's going to daylight.

Go out and click OK. Geolocation, I want to double check that I'm in the right coordinate system. Close and refresh it. And it's going to bring in, and you can see that it didn't actually pick up the style of my road. However, if I pick, on it I can go to my properties, click on road style. Pick on this little thumbnail here, more styles. And pick on my bike path and reset it.

And now I have what the roads are actually going to look like. Go ahead and click on that one. I'm going to do the same thing here. And you could see it meshes together pretty nice for the intersection. It creates a legit intersection.

I have my pipes in here. So I got sanitary and storm. Bam. So I can see all that stuff too. And now all I need to do is say, look, I want to go ahead and create a presentation of it.

Go to my storyboard creator. I'm going to go ahead, and because this is going to be a road-- a design road coming in, I can go create from design road. Select on that. My horizontal offset from the center line is going to be 3 feet. Let's say 3 and 1/2 maybe. Vertically offset, will go the same.

Speed will be automatic. I could go in reverse like I was in the wagon again. Go create. It's going to create all of my keyframe tiles based off of what I put in there. And then I could go ahead and just say play.

And now I can export that as a MP4, WMV. I can bring it into the viewer for Infraworks. If somebody didn't have it, I can send them a URL if I set up a path. So anybody can see it, even if they didn't have Infraworks 360.

I want to go ahead and hit Stop. And I'm going to add something. I want this thing to look a little bit better than just the plain old road going through. So what do I want to do? I want to add parcels in here, houses in here, trees probably.

So I don't know where all these house parcels are. So I want to bring in the parcels from Civil 3-D. So on a separate file I created all the parcels for phase one, two, three, and four of this subdivision.

And then, I want to export it as an SDF. The SDF, I can bring in and I can create these parcels as coverages, and change the colors for my different phases. And it looks like it's phase one, two, three, and four, and it makes sense visually.

So I'm not going to go through that entire process. It's pretty easy to export from Civil 3-D, a SDF file. So if I had my parcels in this file, there is export civil objects as SDF, and it would automatically recognize that they were parcel's. And it would bring those in. And then I would import those as an SDF.

So back into Infraworks. I'm going to go ahead and bring those in. So in my data sources, I'm going to bring in an SDF. So there's an option in here to bring that SDF in. I have-- that's not the one.

I have my overall development parcel's as an SDF. Click on that. And the SDF, at the time when I created those, I had points and alignments in there, so I could bring those in this way too. And then hook on a road. I wouldn't have to necessarily bring it in through the corridor. But I wanted to show you that you could bring just the DWG straight or an SDF. There's multiple options to bring it in.

So I'm going to do parcels. Click OK. Now we need to configure those. I want those to be coverages, so when I open up my common tab, those are going to be coverages in alphabetical order. So coverage areas--

The rule style, I'm not going apply right away. What I want to do is a rule that is going to say, if this parcel has a name of phase one, I want phase one style to be, phase two, if it's phase two name. Geolocation, I obviously want to make sure that it's geolocated.

Source, I want it to drape. No tool tips. And then the rule style, I can set in here later. Close and refresh. It's going to bring in the outlines as coverages. Actually it's going to import, I got to configure it.

There we go. And I didn't put a style to it. So you can see, as I'm scrolling over these things, this is what it's going to show up as. So I don't have a huge lot of time to show you how to actually apply each one individually. I'm going to show you a couple of them here. But if I select on one, go to control, I can select a bunch.

So this is going to be my phase one, phase two, or phase one up here. And now I can go to my style palette. Click on a covered style. In my zoning, I have set up some different styles, which I just changed the color essentially, so it looks visually different. And I can drag and drop those. Apply that to those styles and there's my phase one.

Now if I wanted to go down to my phase two, I got phase two down here. Phase three, select those. This is phase three. Add those and you see how fast that I can just add that different style to each one.

So I have this on what's called a proposal. I created another proposal and that's where I actually imported it. So I'm going to show you what that looks like here. So I did all the work already. You guys don't want to watch me go through that stuff, I'm sure.

So here's phase one, two, three, and four. I added some pond features in here, which is pretty simple to do. If I go to my sketch tool. Then I can add different types of furniture, essentially.

So if I wanted to add a city furniture, which is going to be houses and stuff that I'm going to show you in a minute. Water areas are going to be the ponds. So if I click on a water area, I have the option of doing spline or default. And then I can put a water feature in and that's really what I did for these.