Driving Austin: An Urban Simulation of Austin, Texas, Using InfraWorks and Stingray

ANDY CARTER: I'm going to switch over to my machine. We will come back to that here in just a second. So we are at 3:31. You made it to the last class. I congratulate you for your vigilance. I'm excited that you're here. Laser Larry showed up. I'm excited about that.

My name is Andy Carter. I'm a civil engineer out of Austin, Texas. I co-own a company called CivilE. We're four years old. We're seven guys. And we're kicking ass and taking names. I don't know what else you need to know about me. I'm a registered professional engineer in the state of Texas. What I do for a living is probably what a lot of the other civil engineers and CAD technicians that worked for civil design firms do. I create plans. I cut plan and profile sheets. I lay out water utilities and storm drain lines, and all that good stuff-- for a living. That's what pays the bills. And I do that a lot.

But my life has sucked me into this weird tangent of just recent-- and I'm going to go through that today. This class is called Driving Austin. And I'm not going to give you the whole name. You've seen it. But what we're really doing is we're taking design data and trying to figure out a gymnastics trick to get spatially accurate data into a game engine. In this case, we're going to use 3D Studio Max Interactive, formerly known as Stingray. It's a mouthful. I like to call it MI. There's going to be some weird name that I'm sure we're all going to start nicknaming it, because we don't want to save 3ds Studio Max Interactive, whatever. It's going to change. But we'll see what happens.

I'm going to do a little bit of PowerPoint. But I try to not do a lot. I respectfully request that you hold all your questions to the end. That throws me off pace. If you can silence your phones now, that's also throws me off.

I'm not going to read what we're going to do. I'm going to actually show you the points. So we're going to take a simulation of real spatial data. We're going to use two data sets to start with. We're going to use LiDAR And that's not LiDAR that I've hired anybody to go fly. That's the stuff that we're getting from the local agency. A lot of the big cities have that kind of data.

And then we're going to use something that city of Austin actually is kind of special in having. They've got really good planimetric data for land coverage. And we're going to use that. We're going to export that. We're actually going bring all that stuff together through some gymnastics that I'm going to show. And we're to export that to 3d Studio Max Interactive, and we're going to create an interactive simulation, which some of you all saw before, but I'm about to show again.

And I'm also going to show you how to get that into VR. A lot of people don't really know is it even possible? Is it really hard? I'm a civil engineer. I don't have big budgets to play with VR. I just want to see if I can do it. And I want to do it fast. And a lot of times what I'm building is a one off instance. I'm building a model once, and I'm showing it to six people. And I can't afford to just spend an ungodly amount of time and money to do that, unless they're willing to pay me. And right now they just want to see where we're at and what we're doing. So that's really why we're doing what we're doing at this point. I'm going to go to the next slide.

This is me. We're doing some real time viz to export and belch out just conceptual images. That's kind of a byproduct of doing a model based design. If you're really good at grading in Civil 3D and all that kind of stuff, you can create renderings from real time that are decent. These are all from a real time system. And then I cleaned it up a tiny bit in Photoshop on some of them, but not much.

When I came out of school, and it's going to date me, my TI calculator was my best friend. And I still have it. And if you stole it from me I would be handcuffed, and I wouldn't be able to do my job any more. I'm like so relying upon that. My grandfather had his slide rule. Now it's starting to change a little bit. An Xbox controller is kind of starting to become something a little bit more intuitive into our workflow, which is strange. But think back, some of you, Christmas for me, 1982, I got an Atari 2600. And I was jazzed-- right. It had a joystick and a button. And I could drive a tank around. I could do all kinds of cool stuff.

Here I am, I'm an adult male. And everyone from about that point to now has been effectively born with one of these in their hands. This is a standard intuitive tool now. It's like a calculator. It's like a slide rule. People just know how to use these things. You hand it to a 12-year-old kid and he just knows how to do what he needs to do. 10 years from now, every one of your clients is going to know how to use one of these. It's coming, because we're all getting older. And as generations start back-filling, that's just the way it's going to be. And I'm holding up an Xbox controller for those that are watching later at home.

This is an experiment that we did on a site, a very small site, six acres. And we just tried to see if we could do it-- first person shooter. We did this with the same workflows. And this was our first go into it.

I was bragging at a conference in Dallas to an Autodesk desk employee. And I said, oh, this VR stuff is really easy. And he goes, yeah, BS. And he goes, prove it. And I go, OK. What do you want me to prove it on? And I was thinking five acre site. I've done it before. I could do it again. He goes, do a square mile. I go, oh, OK, we'll see if we can.

This is the limits that we did. We built it, delivered it to Autodesk. Andrew got in there, and went a little crazy. We were kind of excited to see that, that once it was built, he played with it, just to kind of get a feel as to what we were doing. Again, I'm a civil engineer. I'm not an Autodesk employee. I'm not a Max aficionado. I'm just a guy that's doing what a lot of you other guys are doing, right. I'm cranking out plans and building models. So Andrew liked it enough. Brother Bill Clinton got to play in it, which is kind of cool. It just really excited me. That happened four days ago or five days ago. It hasn't been that long.

I'm going to sit down and I'm going to start going crazy with workflow. And I apologize that if I disappear, everything you need to see is going to be on the screen. So two data sets-- I'm starting to Classified LiDAR LAS. Classified is the most important part. If it's not classified, you're going to fight it. Planimetric data-- that's again from the city of Austin. You can see that they've got coverages of where pavement, and grass, and sidewalk, and buildings, and all that stuff is. And then we're going to mesh those two together with a couple of extra things to create the model that you see on your right, which is a real time simulation. I'm going to switch over to that so we can record it for posterity.

This is the game that we built. I'm driving this with an Xbox controller. And those curbs are actually where they are. And that's coming from a gymnastics of some GIS data sets that we did. We can also detach from the car and get a large macro view of what we built. So again, we built one square mile. And we used a lot of Civil 3D data and a lot of InfraWorks data. And I'm going to show you how I did that. And the reason I'm going to do that is because I want you to go back and try to do it yourself. That's kind of why you're here at AU right. You want to see how people do their workflows.

The terrain is right. The trees are cheating a little bit. The real time map is working, and kind of tracking as we go. I'm going to kind of show you part of how I did that. It's a little more complicated and I really don't have time to show it. But I'm going to do the north arrow. If we've got time, we'll do that. And we're not going to build the whole model. We're going to build the area around the capitol, just for speed. But effectively, it's the same workflow.

So I'm going to switch back to my machine. Cool. Sit down and chain myself to the desk like I do most days. This is a workflow. We're going to start with SAGA GIS. Show of hands-- anybody ever heard of SAGA GIS? One guy, right. SAGA is an academic GIS type processing software. It's got a lot of really helpful algorithms. It's a little hard to use, because it is academic. It's not commercial.

But we're going to take the LiDAR DEM, break it down to the ground data, reverse it into a DEM. We're going to do this in a few minutes. And then we're going to go nuts with CAD, do some stuff for striping, and street lights, and curb limits. We're going barf all that stuff into InfraWorks, use that as a spatial aggregation. We're going to go to 3ds Max Interactive and bring all that data in and try to get a real time driving simulation.

At the very end of this class, I'm going to show you how to overcome one triviality to get VR to work. And it's a triviality. But it's buried. And if you don't know it's there, you're going to beat your head like I did for a few hours, just to get your VR stuff to work.

Live demo-- all right. Now it gets scary. I'm going to grab something behind me, which is my cheat sheet. Can I see a show of hands of people that have looked at the write up. A few-- good. There is an exhaustive 32 page bible right up of picks and clicks, and steps of everything that I've done. I'm just showing it to prove you that it's there. It's what I'm using as a reference for me. When we're done with this class, the data sets are there to replicate this. The write up as to how I did it is there. My idea behind this is this is a desk reference that you will keep if you want to try to do this again or try to do it on your own project. So it's well documented.

So I'm going to bring in that LiDAR data, which is an LAS file, classified LAS file. We're going to do an import, and we're going to import an LAS file. And when I bring that in-- I apologize. A lot of times I speak really fast and I go through things really fast. You're going to go back and watch this recording hopefully a couple of times, and it'll start to sink in. And you're going to pick up little tidbits here and there, and you might watch it a second time to get some more. That's just how I teach. I'm sorry. I'm a drinking from a fire hydrant type of guy. So here it comes.

I'm going to go to the class data. And that's the classified LAS that came from the local agency. I'm going to make sure that I bring in the classification data. That's important. I'm going to show you what I have, just really quick. And I'll pick the data-set. We'll say OK. Hopefully this comes up OK. So this is what I've got. And this is showing the classifications, where the ground is, where the buildings are. This is the capitol. You can see all the tree canopies, all that kind of stuff. But it is classified. And you can actually see the building outlines as well. We have this for hundreds of square miles throughout Texas and probably throughout the United States over most urbanized areas. I don't need to see that again.

So now that I brought it in, it's classified, I need to filter it down to just the ground data. And that's going to be under-- this is where I get a little hung up, so give me just a second. That is Shapes, Point Clouds, Reclassified subset extractor. It's going to ask which data set do you want, classification, extract. And I'm going to use two. That's the ground data per ASP-- something. Laser Larry, you might want to correct me if I'm wrong. I can't-- here it is. It's the Photogrammetry Society of the United States. It's their standard.

So now I've got the data. What I need to do now is I need to turn it into a grid, because I really don't want to carry all that point data when I'm processing and dragging it around. So I'm going to do a point cloud. And we're going to do a point cloud to grid. And once I do this one, I'll actually show you the data. I didn't really want to show you the point cloud data while I'm working on it. We will do-- I'm sorry. I'll make sure I do this right. Yup, I only want the Z-data. I don't all the attributes. And I can do the mean or the lowest.

I like the lowest, but that's the civil engineer in me that's always looking for the lowest around. Cell size matters, because that's going to really limit your speed. In this case, I'm going to do a 10 foot cell grid. And you're like, well, you're going to lose everything like curb lines. I know. I'm going to have to clean that up on the back end. So I am introducing inaccuracies when I do this, but I'm doing it for speed. So I'm going to say 10. And we'll say OK. And it's done. I mean you'd even see it process. That's how fast it works. I'm going to delete the data set it created, just so I don't get confused later.

There's-- the grid. What it's doing is it's missing-- it's mowing out the buildings. But since there's no ground data below the building data, it doesn't know what to do there. So you've got all these holes. I'm going to fill those. So I think that is under Grid tools, Close the gaps-- Yup, Close gaps. And it's going to ask what data set, and we're going to ignore the other values. I usually pick the default. Sorry, I didn't pick the grid. And I'll say OK. So I closed the holes.

Well, wait a minute, what did you just do Andy? That's pretty sweet. Yeah, it is. You want to know why? Because you could take Civil 3D data that has holes in it, and you can use this out, you turn into a DEM, and this algorithm and it will grade across the gaps. I've done it. It's pretty sweet. You can actually even smooth it out, which is even cooler. And there are algorithms, yes, in Civil 3D that does that, but this is an open source, academic, free piece of software and it's screamishly fast.

So now that I have it, I have a problem. If I put this into a game simulation, and I drive down it, I'm get this homunculus, wonky surface. It's bumpy. It's hard to drive on. I need to smooth that out to where it's not nearly as bad. So this is going to be the second to last step that we do in SAGA before we export the DEM. And I'm just checking time. I think I'm OK.

I'm going to do a-- where is that? It is a filter tool. And it is a mesh denoising. It's a smoothing algorithm. And I'm going to pick-- I think I picked the right grid. I did. And just trust me that these are the values that I'm using for this one. It's going to vary on your project. And we'll say OK. And done-- it's really fast. And we'll go find that denoised one, and we'll take a look at what that is. And it just smoothed out, right. It's just aggregating and averaging. So now that we have all that, we're going to extract it.

And then we're going to do an output-- Export GDAL OGR, export a GeoTIFF, because we need to keep the spatiality. And we will put that under-- I'll call this run09. We'll call this-- just keep me honest, because sometimes I lose files when I do run throughs. We'll call this DEM 10 foot smooth. All right. I think I got that right. And we'll say save and OK. We're done with SAGA. That's it, right.

So why did I do all of that? Because if I've got 19 LiDAR tiles, I can't really do that in Civil 3D without it just choking. But I can do it here. And it's a lot faster. It's just a processing algorithm. RJS does a lot of this as well, but I don't spend that kind of money per seat for something I don't use that much. Seven man man, seven man-- and limited budgets.

So where are we going now? I think we'll come back to InfraWorks. Let's jump into CAD first. And I'll show you some of the workflow that I did to get a couple of different things. So we're going to deal with pavement markings, which is striping. We're going to deal with street lights, which is a kind of physical object that's placed in a certain direction. And we're going to curb limits. Curb limits is going to be the one that if I do something live and I mess up, I'm going to mess that one up. So I'm a dancing with the devil there. So we'll see where we go.

Pavement markings I'm going to do first. And I'm going to explain how I did this. So I'm going to do a map image insert, just to prove to you that I'm in the right place. Now this data set does come with the walk through, but it's a low res. I'm just putting that to the back. So typically I would use a much higher aerial to figure out where striping is. I would do a bunch of array tools in AutoCAD. I do that kind of stuff. I just go nuts tracing. There are some automated algorithms that help you do this, but I found just doing it manually was better.

So I've broken it into layers. I'm going to do a layer isolate. And I'm going to pick all the white striping lines. I'm going to do a map export, which is one of my favorite commands of all time, because I use it all the time. And I'm going to put that under the run that I'm trying to do live, which is nine. We'll call that working. And I'm going to call this white line. And I always do ln for lines. I think that comes from FEMA. I just got used to it. And we'll say, OK. Boom, we're down with the white lines.

And I'm going to do a layer on to get back. And then I'm going to do the yellow lines. I like to do things three times. I kind of figure the first time you don't know what the heck I'm doing. And then the second time, you kind of start to get it. We're going to call this one yellow line. But I just totally messed it. We'll do yellow ln as a reshape file. We'll do lines. We'll select manually. I want those bad boys. We're done. I don't need to do a third time. I think you get the point.

I have a bunch of different stuff. I've got stop bars. I've got pavement markings. I've got all kinds of stuff that I like to add to the model to aggregate in. But that's where I'm at. So I would go through all of these. Again, you have this data set. You can do them all. And in the walk-through I recommend you doing them all. So I've got the white stripes. I've got the yellow stripes. I would go nuts and do the rest. I'm done with CAD. No, I'm not.

I've got two other things. They are actually relatively straightforward though. So what are these? These are street lights. These street lights have a positional direction. What I did was I created a bunch of blocks, went on in the aerial, and then rotated those blocks to be in a direction that the street light is. So we're going to do a map image insert. I'm going to bring in that aerial. I'm going to draw that to the back. And then you can see where they're at.

Again, a better aerial helps. I'm going to do a map export. And I'm going to call this street point, PT. And I'm going to create a bunch of-- I'm sorry, I want points. And under data, I want the rotation. That rotation is not in degrees. We'll come back to it. It's in radians. I'm going to pick them all. And we'll say OK.

OK, I got one data set that I still need to create. And I'm going to explain this one pretty quick. And this is the one that's hard to replicate, and was hard for me to write up. So I'll just explain what I did. I took the planimetric GIS data that the city of Austin provides for those coverages, the ones that I showed you earlier, and I boiled it down to stuff that was paving and not paving, classified it that way. And then I extracted the curb limits to what was the edge of paving, which may or may not be where curbs are. But that was effectively what I faked in as curves themselves.

There's a problem when we move this in InfraWorks. If you've got a 90 degree angle and it's not filleted, I'm going to end up applying a road style to get the curbs to work, where we'll do that next in a couple of steps. When I do that, if it's a PI at a 90 degree, it's going to go wanko, and lose its mind. So you fillet every line. And you're like, oh, my gosh, that's a lot of lines. There are automated ways to do it. You fillet every line and put a one foot radius on there. That's to force it to not go to AASHTO street standards as it's dropping roads for curbs. That was something that took me a while to figure out.

I'm going to export this one as well. And we'll call this curb line. There's your shape file. We're going to do Lines, select Manual. And we are done with AutoCAD. So we're done with the second step. SAGA-- get your DEM and smooth it out, done. AutoCAD-- get your striping line work, your curb line work, stuff that you need to create shape files to ingest into the model. So we're done with that.

I'm in InfraWorks. I'm going to add the raster that we created. And hopefully I pull the one that we actually just created. Let me make sure I find it in our right spot, which is run 9, working. That's the smooth one. I'm going to configure it. And I've mess this up once before. I want to make sure I get that right. So I picked a coordinate zone that I was on. And we're good. That's that smooth terrain. If you remember before, that's that little hole over by the capitol. But that's the terrain data that we've got.

So now I want to bring in the planimetric land covered stuff. So you're like, why Andy? Why don't you just use aerials? Aerials are better. And you're like, man, if you've ever been in VR on the surface of an aerial looking at it, it is muddy, muddy, muddy. You need to paint the ground with what's actually there in the real time viz, otherwise it is going to look bad. That's just a tip. Even if you've got three inch, it looks weird when you're standing on top of it. I'm going to add a shape file. And I'm going to cheat on this one, but I've already clipped it out of the city planimetric data, which is in the working files, which is civil planimetrics.

And this is kind of weird. And I'll explain it here in a second. This is going to be a coverage. It's geolocation. I'm fine with it. It has to be draped. The description is the feature. So that says that if it's pavement, or water, that kind of stuff. It's already labeled in the shape file. And we will close and refresh it. And you'll be like, all right, cool, all those coverages are in. But they're not the right color. Grass isn't grass, and all that kind of stuff. I know, there's a trick to that. And we'll get into that here just in a second.

So I'm going to correct all that stuff. And I need to go to the rule styles, which I don't know how many people use. They're really helpful. They're good stuff. I'm going to go to the coverage area. I'm just going to select them all and delete them. I'm going to say cool. And I'm going to import ones that I've already created. So this is a little canned. I apologize for that. It was going to take me too long to explain how I did it. But you'll see, it's a JSON file. I set it up in InfraWorks and saved it out.

Once I've done it once, now I can do it every time, anywhere in the city of Austin, because it's the same shape file with the same descriptions. You'd have to do it as your city varies, and your planimetrics do vary. You can create your own planimetrics. You can go nuts in AutoCAD and create your own planimetrics if you want from aerials. Or you can hire a vendor to go get you some good planimetrics. That's the easier way to do it. Good. Hopefully this works. Cross your fingers. Yeah. Done. I just put the right stuff in the right place, sidewalks, and all the asphalt. That stuff is done. I'm lazy. I don't want to do that. That takes forever. But now I'm done. Cool, right.

Next thing-- we're going to add some parking stripes. That's pretty basic. I'm only going to do one of the two shape files. I just don't want to tempt fate. But I will do the actual data that we just produced just to prove you that I am not baking this. We'll do the white lines, because there's more of them. And I'm going to configure that. And that is going to be a coverage as well. It's geolocation. That's on Texas Central State plane. It's draped. Under the table there's a buffer. I'm going to make them two inch thick. And I'll make them white, because I like white. Good, done. There are all those parking stripes. And you can tell, it's the right grade-ish. It's not perfect, because we smoothed it, mainly because we want to drive on it, and we don't want to wonky wiggle over the top of it.

The next data set that we need to bring in is going to be the street lights. And that is a shape file as well. That's the street point shape file that we created. I'm going to configure that bad boy. I'm going to make that city furniture this time. I'm going to make sure it's draped. Under its rotation-- remember I exported out the rotation value when I did a map export. There's the rotation, but you said it was in radians. Yeah, yeah, it's in radians. I need to convert it to degrees. So I'm going to do a times 57.2. And I also messed up my blocks, so I'm going to cheat and I'm going to subtract 90 degrees. That's just something I messed up.

Now what kind of something do I want to show there? I want a street light. Close and refresh. Boom. Done. They're all in there. Now granted they all say 9th Street. What I did in my actual model is I went in there and took there asset, and I took that street sign out just so every street wasn't 9th Street. It's not hard to do. It's a little bit of Max. And I'm trying to not do Max in this class. And I'm not a Max aficionado and I don't really want to get to heavy in there.

So I have everything except the buildings and the curbs. And I'm trying to avoid the curbs, because the curbs scare me, because it's hard. I came up with a really clever workflow. It's not real straightforward. And I'm going to use my little guide to cheat and explain how that's done. So I'm going to create a custom road that's just the curb. And you're like, well, that's cool, but I also need almost like in Civil 3D you've got conditional targets, slope catches on either side. I'm going to fake that. And I'm going to let it warp the ground to put that road in there with the curb in the right spot. This might not work and I'm just giving you a disclaimer that this might not work the way that I want, because I've run this through about 11 times, and it's done it every time except about twice. So keep me honest if I do something weird.

I'm going to go to the style palette and I'm going to create a custom roadway. And I need to find the roads. Boom. I'm going to start with the sidewalk one. I'm just going to copy it. And I'm going to rename it to AA curb only. You're like, why AA? So I can find it-- it'll be at the top of the list. And it's going to take a while to process, so we'll see. So now it's a top of the list.

And I'm going to edit it. And I'm going to maximize this. For those that are familiar with InfraWorks road editing, it's a little weird. It takes a little bit of getting used to. I don't want any lane markings. So that's gone. I don't need any sidewalk or green space, so I'm going to blow those away. And I actually want two sides. And I don't want it to be the same. So I'm going to copy them.

And this is where I'm going to get a little strange. So just ride with me for a few minutes while I do this. And then once I'm finished I'll explain what I did and how it works. On the left group I need a duplicate roadway. Sorry, on the left I need a curb and a roadway, in that order. So there's the curb. There's a roadway. And I need on the right group just a roadway.

So I'm going to copy-- well, let me edit these first. So for the left group I want 1.64 feet-- there's my decimal point not working, 1.64 feet. And the track width is going to be 0.5 feet. The track height is going to be 0.5 feet. The roadway-- I'm going to make that 0.75 feet. The track offset is going to be -0.65 feet. So we're good there.

Now I'm going to copy that roadway just so I can move it into the right group as well. Come out, let me copy you. Is that right? Yeah, cool. So I'm going to move him down. And I'm going to change him to be-- I think this is the last step. I feel pretty good-- 16.4. So what did I do? What the heck did he just do? I want the control, the assembly point, I want it at the top of curb not at the bottom of curb.

And the left group has a transitional distance of 1.64 feet. Don't ask me. I did this all in metric and I converted it over. So that's like a foot to work into the ground, to chase it on the back side of the curb. On the front side of the curb, we all know that roadways have crowns. So the middle of the road is higher than the gutter line of the road itself. And I want that to kind of warp up. Again, we're chasing that smooth LiDAR data that we created earlier. So we need it to work itself back into the terrain that we created. So that's what I'm doing there.

So I hope this works. It's worked for me before. So we're going to give it a shot. So I'm going to bring in that curb data, the shape file. And if this works, beer is on me. Figure-- we're going to call this a road style. And you're like, that is weird. Yes, I know. That's super weird. We're going to drape it, because it already knows the elevations that they need to be at-- sort of, like in the vicinity. And I'm going to pick a style that is curve only. And we will see if it works. Come on, baby. It's Vegas.

Look at that, man. That is sick . That is cool stuff. First time I did this, I was just so excited. I was like, I have curves everywhere, where they're supposed to be, and it's pretty much relatively accurate-- I mean accurate enough. And it's on the ground at the ground elevations they are supposed to be. You can do some gymnastics with road styles that aren't roads. You can do some weird stuff with roads. This is one of them. So we're cool, right?

Next one-- building. This is the last thing we've got to do in InfraWorks. And I'm going to tell you where these came from. This one I haven't created. I'm going to pull that from the class data. And that is-- that's not good, because I did something totally wrong. It's a 3D model. And I'm going to go to Class Data, Project Files, and I don't mind where I put it. Yeah-- InfraWorks. It's an FPX that I created intermediate.

There's a group they did all these buildings as masses. It's Cyber City. Show of hands-- anybody work with those guys before? They've got good models. I think what they're doing is they're taking the regional LAS data that I showed you earlier, and they're boiling it down into a polygonal building model. And then they give you a bunch of [INAUDIBLE] files, DAE files, and they give you a spatial location where it is. They gave me a script that works in InfraWorks that places the buildings as they go. And I know some people here have played with that. But it's a nice data set. They're not textured, unless you pay them more, but they are available, and they are spatially accurate at height and the right location. So, it's pretty cool.

I'm going to configure. And just trust me on this one. This one's a little bit of a leap of faith. I created a coordinate that I'm controlling the whole model against. And I've just kind of pre-canned that. And I'll explain that when I'm done here. And I want to make sure I get the right number-- one, two, three, and this is negative five. Close and refresh-- we'll see if that works. What is it? It is a building. And we'll close and refresh it. And we've got a little bit of spatial shift, because I'm canning this for a little bit of speed. But that's it. We just built the model.

I don't even know what time it is-- 5:06. I'm sorry, 4:06. I'm on central time still, which means we still have tons of time. So I'm in a good mood. That's it. We've done everything we need to do in InfraWorks.

So now the coup de gras-- I want to get it into Stingray. How do I do that? Show of hands, anybody deal with Stingray now 3ds Max Interactive? There's one-- not many, two, three, four, five, six. There's a few. It's really not a hard tool. I am not-- I'm a novice, moving into an intermediate range. I am not an expert. I wouldn't even say I'm an intermediate, heavy player. I don't get in this program a lot. That's the cool part of it. You just don't really need to know a lot to get this thing to work, which is pretty nice.

I played with some others, Unity Unreal. I struggled more. The learning curve is steeper for me. I felt that 3ds Max Interactive was just a cleaner way to go. That's me proselytizing. I'm not getting any endorsements from them. I'm just telling you that in my opinion that's where I'm at.

I'm going to export this model. I'm going to export as a 3D model. And I'm going to do the whole friggin model, use entire, same coordinate zone-- cool. Remember I had that canned user defined point, what am I doing there? 3ds Max, Revit, all those things, they've got a single precision or 32-bit deal, and everything that's out in state plane goes nutzo. It just loses its freaking mind. It doesn't know what to do, because it's so far away from the origin.

Back when I started, when I was young, just slick pup right out of college, the lower left corner of the world was 5,000, 5,000. In civil engineering, do you all remember that? We just picked a corner, and we just arbitrarily-- we're doing that in 3ds Max Interactive and Revit now. We've gone back in time to do that, because of this single precision issue that we've got. So I picked a coordinate that was round and even, that was in the lower left hand corner of the model, just to get everything close enough to the origin. That is 3113000 and this is 100072000.

And I want everything and I want the textures, yes, please. Merge all as the same object. Make sure that I put this in a place that we can get to it when we are in 3ds Max Interactive. That is run09. Let's call that working-- keep me honest, if I can't find it later. And I think we're OK. So now we're barfing out an FBX file with all the textures. And it's spatially accurate. It is true scale dimensional world stuff. We're done. I just did it. That's how fast it can be.

So I'm going to jump over into-- 3ds Max interactive is not loaded. So we are going to suffer for Andy loading 3D Studio Max-- sorry, Stingray. I've already loaded a project, so when you start it gives you a template of what you want to build. We're going to do a car one first. And it takes a few minutes to load all the assets in the default. Once you have done it once, it's a little faster to load.

So this is the standard 3D Studio Max Interactive, formerly known as Stingray Project for Driving Template. I'm going to delete everything in this template, except the basic floor number one, basic floor is fine. And I'm just highlighting and deleting. And I'm going to make sure if there's anything else that I need, get rid of that reflection probe. And we'll delete the wall. I think that's it. That's all we need.

So now I need to bring in that FDX file that I created, because I want to drive on it. I want to feel cool that I can drive around on it. I'm going to go to the content folder under Models. Organization matters a bunch in 3D Studio Max Interactive. And I'm going to create a folder. And we're going to call that AU2017, and say OK. That's where I'm going to import-- this Import button over here, at the bottom left. I'm going to import that FBX file, which I'm going to do the one we just created, just make sure that I'm being legit.

This window-- warning, danger, stop, drop everything, pay attention. This window will screw you up if you don't pay attention to it. I like to create a materials folder. I like to create a texture folder. I'm going to turn all of these off. I'm just going to import the tangents. That was the one that if you don't check it, you're going to be sad, because what it's going to do is it's going to break everything by texture. You want them all to come in as one bad boy. And we'll import it. This is going to be relatively fast. It's not a big model.

Notice you've got your materials in your texture folder. And now that IM export that we created is brought in. Obviously you'd want to name it something better. Drag it into the space. And over here on the translate, I'm just going to right click to 000. And then I'm going to double click to zoom to that unit. And by the way, navigation is a little weird. It's W-A-S-D and the right click to pan. And if you start moving in, and you're like, oh, my gosh, it's taking forever. It's super slow. Just roll the mouse forward, and it starts speeding up. And if you want to slow down, just roll it back. It's strange. It's not like anything you probably really used. It's takes a little while to get used to.

So now I want to drop a car on it. The car is preloaded in the standard drive template. It's already there. The physics is working. It's ready to go. But the engine-- let's call 3ds Max what it is, a game engine-- needs to know that you've got collisional physics. Everything can crash into, that you can drive on it. It needs to know that gravity applies and that it should intersect into it.

So I'm going to right click and say Open Unit Editor. And this might take a second to load. I don't even need to see it. It's going to try to show it to me. I'm right clicking and saying Create Physics Actor. So what is that doing? It's like shrink wrapping the mesh. And every polygon is now a physiced object, that you can step, on or drive across, or collide into. Game engines all have different terms for this, but they all do this. If you have computational speeds with size of mesh, you can do a level of detail calculation to simplify that mesh, but then you're only driving on what you've simplified. So you might ramp up the curb, because the poly mesh is a little simpler-- I won't get into it. But there are ways to do it.

Now I need to make sure that when I start the car, it starts in a place that is on my model, which is kind of a pain in the ass, because if you start right now, you're going to drop onto probably that ground one, that basic floor, and my model is 900 feet up in the air. And 5,000 feet that way. So I need to correct that. This is a pain in the butt. It's not hard. It's just something you're going to forget.

So under Scripts, lua-- now I'm going to get in a little bit of code. So if that scares anybody, I'm sorry. You just need to get in there and mess with it. There's not much you need to do. I'm under the player.lua file. And I'm going to go to line about 110-ish. So that's where it's starting the car. So world.span unit-- the car, put it there. That's a Cartesian coordinates, XYZ. So I'm going to place that car where I need to start, which is -825, -202.

And you're like, how in the heck Andy did you know that that is the right place? The easiest way is to create another object, just don't delete the cone or the cube or something that it loads in by default, and just place it on the model. And then write that coordinate down. And then add a foot or two vertically, because what happens is when that car loads, you want it to drop onto the surface. If it's right on the surface, it will drop right through, and you'll go meet the devil. You're going to go straight down. So we will save that.