Creating 3D Model Assets for InfraWorks

MARK KAUFFMAN: OK. We'll get started here in about two minutes. I'll just give you about two minutes. I'm just re-booting my laptop-- brand new machine, love this thing. Got two weeks ago and there's something wrong with it and I can't quite figured out. It's fine, it's fine, and it locks. And not just an application crashes, the entire OS locks up. I thought, well, maybe it's a driver or something, so I uninstall window-- actually not uninstall, you can't do that-- but wiped the hard drive completely, install-- and we run Windows 7 Enterprise in our organization-- so I put that on there anyways as opposed to the stock HP Image.

And during the actual booting off the DVD and starting the whole process, it locks up. I'm thinking, this is really bizarre. So I get it installed, and get it updated. You know how long that takes. Because I'm starting with an SP1 installer and then it's got to go through all those updates to get you up to. I finally get that done-- everything. I'm almost ready to roll it into the date domain and it starts locking up like crazy. I thought, I'm just going to try it, so I installed Windows 10 on it. It's running fantastic with that laptop. And it starts locking up. And I'm thinking, OK, this is only three days old and I'm having all these wonky problems, why is it me? I don't understand.

So I hand it off to our IT person, because I don't have time to troubleshoot too much. And he talks to HP. And he says, oh well, it's been running fine for us, but-- what is he doing? He's just sitting there and just kind of moving the mouse around. Well [AUDIO OUT] application, like your office applications, your rd application-- is he actually sit down and doing any of that? No he's not, because he's an IT guy, that's not his job to use the laptop in that respect.

So they do a couple things. And he says, it seems to be working fine for me. I get it back and it actually seems to be going pretty good for the day. And then what happens over Thanksgiving? Locks up. Yeah, wonderful!

So I ended up just do a little troubleshooting myself. Actually pulled the battery, pulled the little bios battery that's on the inside-- luckily these new HP's have those release bottoms so you can just slide them off, you don't have to get the tools out. Pull that. And it's been fantastic since Sunday this week. It's been great. Then this morning? Lock up.

So in fact, just a minute ago I had to re-boot it. Hopefully, it's going to be good. So we'll just say, good laptop, you're very good boy, girl, person, machine. Excellent. OK.

So I'll go ahead and get started here. Thanks for coming to the class. This is creating 3D Model Assets for InfraWorks. My name is Mark Kauffman, I'm the Technical Lead of Project Visualization for WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff. I've been doing InfraWorks since day one. In fact when it was project Galileo-- I want to say it was even a project "something" before that, when it was Infrastructure Modeler.

And started working with that. Was in the labs, kind of migrated eventually over to InfraWorks, their new re-branding. And I actually get a chance to work with the Sandbox. And I don't say anything more than that, just look it up on the web you can find it.

Who here was in David Lawrence's class yesterday about InfraWorks? I saw you there. His workflow is dealing a lot with getting stuff from InfraWorks to Civil 3D and back. My question for you guys is, how many of you are InfraWorks users, obviously? Most you, OK. How many are 3ds Max users? Revit? SketchUp, that other application?

So most of you are dealing with applications where you're generating content for InfraWorks. Now, if you've worked with InfraWorks, while it's a nice application, we can all agree that the library is less than stellar. So the street furniture, as they call it, there's some trees, there some people, and some cars, and that Alfa-Romeo looks kind of scary, that kind of stuff. So the idea is that you want to be able to build your own assets.

So when I came up this class idea-- and this is right about the time that we were dealing with the California High Speed Rail. And we end up using InfraWorks as part of the pursuit process. And they said, oh well, can we go through and build a high speed rail guide way with centenary lines, all this. I'm thinking, I can't really do that, you'd have to build it in a separate program, like 3ds Max, or MicroStation, or whatever. You have to import it as this giant thing.

But think about it, I've got a corridor that's 20-30 miles along. To build a piece of geometry that goes that far, I don't think so. Wouldn't it be nice just to have a line that's a road, or as a rail and do that?

So I did a little research on it at the time. I had the opportunity to check out some new techniques. But the other whole thing came up of OK, well-- if you've used InfraWorks, you know what a decoration is. Anybody here not know what a decoration is? Good.

So you can add decorations on your roads, and your rail lines, and stuff. Well how do you get that actual content in? And the whole process of getting the content into InfraWorks, there's a couple of things you had to learn ahead of time. And there was a little bit about the formats that you were exchanging between InfraWorks your program. And again, this class is going to focus primarily on 3ds Max, primarily because that's my application of choice.

The techniques we're going to learn transcend 3ds Max. It could be a Maya, could be a SketchUp, a Rhino or whatever you're dealing with. But we will talk about the different file formats to work with. We'll talk about the different image file formats that you work with for your assets. So what kind of maps you use, what map channels are supported. As well as what scales you have to work with to make sure everything works. And we'll also get a chance to look at building some custom road systems.

Now, you probably have looked at this. I'm not going to go through the Class Summary. Little bit about what's going on, we're going to cover pretty much most of that. We've got about an hour and a half. Kind of what you're going to be learning towards the end of this class.

So there's a couple of ground rules that we need to look at as far as dealing with-- and what I mean by ground rules are elements about your production that are either limitations or methods that you have to follow in order to be able to get content from your digital content creation program-- 3ds Max, Maya, SketchUp, et cetera-- over to InfraWorks.

And one of the first ones is this whole thing with Scale. I guess I didn't set that up right. The first one is scale. Now when I talk about scale, while you can work in feet, and you work in inches, and you could work in centimeters and millimeters-- in my experience, whenever you create your content if you work in say, feet, you bring it in as an asset. So a 3D model asset into InfraWorks, it's not scale properly. It thinks that the units are meters, it always wants to bring everything in meters.

So whatever you're working in, always start working in meters. So in SketchUp when you could first create your template, you can select the meters template. In Max, you set your system unit. If you're using the newer version of 3ds Max, you can create templates. Same thing with any of your other digital content creation applications.

The second one, no 3rd party renderers. And what I mean by that is, if you're a 3ds Max user like me, I use V-Ray as my render engine. So if you build all your assets-- and we have a whole library that we work with in project visualization that has all of our cars, and our people, and our trees-- and they're all built either as Vray proxies or they're raw 3ds Max elements, but they all have Vray materials on them.

Now you can imagine while it looks great in Vray, you send it over to InfraWorks and it says, I have no idea what this is. I don't know what this material channel is. In fact a lot of times, I use FBX as my primary export format. And it'll say, what kind of file format? I don't understand that. It's an unknown material, so it doesn't come out.

So whatever you're working with you want to use the stock [? Fong ?] blend standard material system that ships with your 3D application. So in 3ds Max it's a standard material. Just a stock material that you work with in SketchUp will work. Same thing with Maya, stock Maya material will work. And so on and so forth.

In this class we'll get a chance to look at a methodology that I-- oh, yes? Please.

AUDIENCE: Up there it says no third party materials, but then you specifically mentioned your render, using third party renders. [INAUDIBLE] pulling in your own custom materials on objects and then [INAUDIBLE].

MARK KAUFFMAN: Yeah we will. No, that's a great question. By the way if you have questions at any point in time, please stop and raise your hand and ask the question. So the question is, I'm talking about third party renderers and materials. Most third party renderers-- so to take Mental Ray and Vray, I'll use 3ds Max here-- while you can use a standard material with Vray, most of the time you're going to use a Vray material, a specific one. Or if you're working with Mental Ray, you're going to work with an arc and design material, which is stock inside of 3ds Max. However when you export to FBX, you're going to get a warning to say, this is an undetected type of material.

We'll also talk specifically about what types of textures, or shaders, are supported within even the standard material. Does that answer your question a little bit better? OK. Good.

So we'll talk a little bit about bitmap types. Now, bitmap types-- there are several types to work with. And you can bring them into InfraWorks and you can support pretty much everything here, so TGAs, JPGs, BMPs, TIFs, and PNGs. My recommendation is this, stick with two, if you can possibly do it, and one primarily.

First of all JPGs are fine, but JPGs are compressed images. And unless they're saved at the highest quality setting, you're going to lose some quality in the image. There's another disadvantage to JPG and that is it doesn't supporting any alpha channels. Anybody not know what an alpha channel is? Good.

TGAs support alpha channels, so do BMPS more or less. It's better to think that while BMPs technically could support an alpha channel, don't use an alpha channel with BMPs. TIFs and PNGs, on the other hand, support alpha channels and they also support transparency. That can lead to some potential problems, we will take a look at those as well.

But one of the advantages-- and this is our particular workflow on project [? Biz, ?] but I was recommend this is-- if you're going to use any kind of imagery for your bitmap libraries that you used to assign materials, it's usually best to use a PNG. The nice thing about a PNG is first of all, it's a lossless compression format. TIF is kind of the same thing. You can support alpha channels, you can support transparency, higher bit depths.

The most important thing though is-- probably the majority of you are working in Windows. And when you see Windows-- looking at icons-- and you want to build a library of-- OK, there's all these maps called, concrete one, concrete two, concrete three. You can just go ahead and say, I want to view it as a thumbnail, large or extra large. Well if it's a TGA, it's going to go, I don't want this is. It's going to pop up a little windows icon to say, this is a file, that's a TGA. I don't know what it is I can't read it.

With JPGs, and TIFs, and PNGs, natively windows can support that, so you can go ahead and view them as a thumbnail. Now, Windows is smart enough to also create a little bitmap cache file inside the file folder whenever you go through and generator thumbnails. So you generate them once and then-- hopefully, when you go back to that folder again and you say, show me the extra large icons, it'll just populate them really quick. You won't have to go through and write them, which is easy on your local hard drive, but if you go to a network drive and you've got 500 images in a folder, you're sitting there waiting and wake. I recommend the TIF and the PNG format as your primary formats for your bitmaps that you use on your textures.

Now the next thing, I want to talk a little bit about the formats and part of the ground rules. There's really three formats that you want to use it in InfraWorks. Now, while you can support some other kinds of 3d files, for the most part these are the ones you want to work with.

The first two on the ones you primarily want to work with. And we're going to go through each one of these. It's really great, I get a chance to work with the development team for InfraWorks. They had an intern in there and he set out a document-- because they knew that I was dealing a lot with this-- back in the day, InfraWorks when it was Infrastructure Modeler, can support one material channel and that was diffuse. And so you had to texture, but you couldn't do normals, and you couldn't do bumps, and you could do specularity, and other things like that.

Well, they had him and go through and prepare this long document. And I ended up using some of the stuff and I will give credit to him here-- I do in my document-- for really going through and examining every single format. I had a chance do this myself and ran into a couple of bugs. It's always nice about doing these classes, it's like, it's supposed to-- it doesn't work there, oh! There's another bug I can log! Good.

All right. So the three I have here OBJ, FBX, and DAE. Anybody not know what DAE is? OK, COLLADA.

Now, what's important about these three formats is-- this is the one is I primarily use most of the time, FBX. OBJ is actually a really good format for exchange. In fact, a lot of higher end digital content creation programs, that's like the go-to format. FBX is nice. It's an Autodesk stuff. It was based originally on film box. It can support a lot of bringing stuff from say, 3ds Max to Maya without skipping a beat, but also other applications. COLLADA is-- there's one very good advantage to COLLADA, otherwise I do not recommend it as your standard support format.

COLLADA is one of those open source formats that was really great. They talked about it, it was supposed to be open and wonderful. And it never really went anywhere from there. The nice thing about COLLADA is they support animation, whereas OBJ and FBX do not support animation. We'll get a chance to look at that a little bit later. You can do 3ds and some others. Don't even bother with it, just stick with those three. Yes, question?

AUDIENCE: I've been using DAE, COLLADA, stuff for SketchUp and there's a lot of question into [INAUDIBLE] Have you seen that?

MARK KAUFFMAN: Yes I have. And Autodesk, interesting in Max, they support an Autodesk DAE, which is using the COLLADA format to export. It makes these gigantic inefficient files. I think it's one of those situations-- you know it's funny with lots of software companies, they're always going to want to promote their proprietary formats even if they are somewhat more open format, like FBX. COLLADA they've kind of just let things slide off to the side. They're hoping everybody will adopt FBX. And SketchUp its kind of the opposite there, they don't want to adapt any FBX capabilities.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK KAUFFMAN: Exactly. So they don't want to compete. They don't want to make it easy to work. My philosophy is, it doesn't matter what your program is, it does what you need it to do and you're happy with that workflow. I think you should do everything possible to say, if you're SketchUp user-- and believe me for modeling buildings, SketchUp is the bomb. You can just bang out buildings. One of our guys uses SketchUp exclusively and he can model context buildings like crazy in SketchUp. But then we can open up the SketchUp file in Max integrate it into our visualizations. And we're all happy campers. If we have to do any really intricate modeling that is more difficult to do with SketchUp, then we do it in Max. But it doesn't really matter. The most important thing is we have multiple applications.

Yesterday when I was in Dave Lawrence's class, he was saying, who here would want to program that does everything? Nobody raised their hand. They don't want this program, this giant, beastly, monster from hell that does everything. It's kind of hard to do that, each program has its specialties. So I get off my soapbox here about that. So moving on.

And of course animation. If you're going to support it, you have to use a COLLADA format. And we'll talk specifically about what is supported. So for instance-- well, we'll get more into it-- but, you can support very rudimentary animation, but nothing complex like deformed meshes and morph target. So in other words, you can't do point cash people walking around. Won't work.

So a little bit about material channels. Now it sounds like most of you understand a lot of the stuff, so we'll kind of breeze through it and spend more time working on-- what are the specifics about the workflows that we bring to this class, that I bring to this class. And not worry about, do you know what a diffuse channel is and an opacity channel? But we will talk about the idiosyncrasies about those going between your different DCC applications.

So of course with material channels InfraWorks will support four primary material channels. The diffuse, which it already has. An example here. Has anybody used Substance before? Anybody not know what Substance is? Raise your hand. OK. If you run 3ds Max, there's a shader that you can go in and select for your diffuse or whatever, and it's called Substance.

Substance is a small little file and it's made by company out of France, called Allegorithmic. They make some great tools. But it's a shader file that explains, hey, here's a brick texture and it will not only do this procedural brick texture, but it will also spit out a normal map, a diffuse channel, a specular channel, and everything for you. You can load it into 3ds Max. And if you go into the schematic material editor-- and maybe we'll take a look at this a little bit later, a little bit beyond the scope of this class. But you can use a Substance material to spit out this stuff. And it's great.

And then there's this free application, called the Substance Player. You have to buy the shaders. And they ship a couple of free ones with 3ds Max, and Maya, and so on, and so forth. But you can buy more from them and you can modify the shader. So if it's a brick or concrete, you can change the color of it, the attributes of it. Is it more distressed? Is it like brand new concrete? If it's this type of wall pattern or things like that. And you can generate all additional map channels out of it. If we get some time, I'll show you that if we can. But it's a great tool and that's what I actually used to generate that little image. So that's just an image of ivy on a wall. So in this case we have a diffuse channel.

The opacity channel. Because of the ivy, it's meant to be-- I want to place it onto a surface, like it's crawling up the wall. And so the white areas are completely opaque and the black areas are completely transparent. And anything in varying levels of gray and it creates varying levels of transparency. So it's gray, it's going to be semi-transparent. If it's black, it's completely transparent. White, it's completely opaque.

The other thing it'll support is specular. This project here will not show the specular channel, because it's barely there. But specularity, for this particular one in Substance said, OK, these are leaves. And leaves have a little bit of specular highlight, they're not really overly glossy, but they have a little bit of a sheen to them when you look at the leaves. So if you could see that better, you'd see it.

And then finally a bump and normal. Now what's interesting about InfraWorks is it supports both bump and normal maps. So if you use a bump map in your DCC application, just a grayscale image-- and that's just white is the highest points, black is the troughs, and gray is like the zero point. White is one and black is negative one if you use like a height information.

Normal maps are RGB-based bump maps shall we say. But instead of just showing heights data, it's using height and 3D spatial information to explain that surface. And with lots of real time shading systems-- and that's essentially what InfraWorks uses to be able to show bumpiness-- you can get a lot more details. Let's say you have a retaining wall that has a very distinctive interlocking stone pattern on it, you can do a normal map out of that. And instead of looking like just a flat surface, like you see over here on the wall, you can see that bumpiness depending on where you are. And it'll actually shade based on the sun and other things like that. It's much more robust than a bump map, but the nice thing about it is that it will support both.

It's interesting. When I found this out, I was running and testing the beta version of InfraWorks about two years ago. And I had loaded up an old model for the Los Angeles airport that we had. And it had bump maps and it was built in 2006, so it didn't have any normal maps or anything. And I just loaded the geometry in there, because I needed it for my scene. I'm like, wow, that building looks interesting. Because I had a bump map on the roof to show gravel that they'll put on the tops of roofs and whatnot. Then I got down, I'm like yay! It supports bump maps! And at that point it also supported specularity and some other things. I went to town from there. So it was really nice.

So those are the four channels that you could support out of your DCC application into InfraWorks. Nothing else. You can't support-- and we'll talk about each one of those and what the limitations are. But some other things come into play like, do you support ambient occlusion? And all this other. No, it doesn't support that.

So I came up with a little chart about or your different bitmap types and specifically what they will and will not support. So this is kind of the whole thing. One of the reasons why I suggested PNG and TIF is because PNG and TIF support everything. In fact in this chart, you'll see that, yeah TGA will support the RGB data, it will support the alpha data, but it won't support transparency. So in other words, if you have alpha channel on a TGA, InfraWorks will just ignore it. It just doesn't care. With a PNG on the other hand, it supports both the RGB, the alpha, and transparency data.

Does anyone understand what the difference between transparency and alpha is? Who here's worked with Photoshop? Hopefully everybody. OK. So when you go to Photoshop, you have an image on the screen. And let's say it's my hand. And it's just standing out there and it's got a black background on it. Well, what you can do is select all the black background and knock it out. So there's this gray and white checkerboard area, it's transparency. And alpha channel says, I want a black and white map that explains the cut out, the mask, around my hand here.

But transparency goes one step further. It's kind of a quick way of doing a layering system inside Photoshop. So both PNGs and TIFs support transparency information. JPGs do support RGB, no alpha and no transparency. BMP maps technically can support alpha channels, it doesn't quite work with InfraWorks.

So this is why again I selected those two primary formats. One because Windows see them and generate thumbnail icons. Two, because they're a lossless compression format. And three, InfraWorks can support all of that there. Any questions so far? Good.

So the next thing is-- this is kind of an interesting chart. I provided this inside the document. And this is an important thing. So you've got all these different materials and you want to see OK, well I want to use FBX, or do I use OBJ? Or do I use COLLADA? Well, this chart kind of goes through.

And this is from that intern I told you that was Autodesk. He actually built this for me. And I got to tell you, it's really nice to have someone go through and test a lot of this. Although I found a couple of issues. So basically, this chart is-- wrong button, sorry. So this chart is broken down by material settings.

So what I mean by no settings, or no textures is, I have materials-- Inside 3ds Max, you have a diffuse channel and it can have a simple color to it. You also have the ability to have a specular channel, a specular color channel, a specular level, a gloss level, a self illumination, and a self illumination color. We'll take a look at that here shortly in 3ds Max.

Now, a lot of your digital content creation programs-- so if you have a standard phong, or blend type shader system, which most of the stock 3D materials have that, you're going to have these capabilities. That's what it's talking about here. So just simple colors.

So for instance, OBJ, FBX, and COLLADA all support defuse. All of them support specular color, specular level. Glossy level is not supported in OBJ, but is supported in FBX and not COLLADA. And you kind of go through. So you can see, if you want to do any self illumination, which is great-- hey, I've got this lamp and it's got a light globe in there. And I want it to be illuminated, it may not generate any light in InfraWorks. [AUDIO OUT] When you have the sun go down, wouldn't it be nice to have lights on a bridge or something like that? Well, low and behold, InfraWorks doesn't support that.

We go a little bit further and we have texture types. So textures would be your shaders, or your textures, that you plug into the diffuse channel. So in the case of that ivy before, that's the bitmap that you plugged in to make it look like ivy. So OBJ supports defuse. All of them support diffuse. Specular level does not support, does not support, does not support. This is interesting.

So I started working with this. And it's interesting because OBJ is the only one that supports a specular map. But we'll see how you run into some problems with the specular coloring, glossiness, and whatnot. And we'll take a look at that. It's almost like FBX is better, but OBJ is better, but not in this case, but in this case. And you're like, oh! Why can't I just have one!

In fact, I was talking with one of the developers-- and I'm going to be talking to him later on today about why. He's like, well, why does it work over here, but doesn't work-- I'm going to have to go through and figure that out. Maybe it's just a matter of code, by clicking a check box and the next release of InfraWorks will just work with all of those, which would be nice.

Glossiness does not support, does not support. Opacity supports, supports. Bump normal, supports, supports, does not support.

So in my estimation, your best option is FBX number one, OBJ number two, and COLLADA number three as far as the most compatible and the least compatible based on this chart right here.

A lot of it is also going to be based on, do I really need animation? Well, you're going I have to forgo your bump maps and some of your other functionalities, but I really need that spinning windmill like they have in their samples for InfraWorks. Or I have a car that's moving, or whatever. I need it there, it has to be there.

So I want to go a little bit over 3ds Max first. And then we'll come back to this. And this is getting more into InfraWorks. How do you create your actual libraries, walking through this process. There's all these buttons, but how do they work and what can you do? So let's go ahead and stop here for a second. I'm going to jump over to 3ds Max.

And by the way, I provided all these scene files, all the materials, all this stuff with the class materials in the class document itself. There's several locations where it says "link" in the document. If you click on that link, it'll go to my one drive page. So it has the documents as a PDF. A PDF document as well as a zip file with all of the class materials inside there. So there's some FBX files, and OBJ, and Max files.

In fact, we're going to learn-- again who uses 3ds Max here? Do you have the design version of 3ds Max or standard version? So if you have design up to 2015, it comes with Civil View, which is a great application for taking content from civil 3D, bring it into 3ds Max and generating roads and other content. But it ships with a whole bunch of cars. And they're actually really nice cars.

Well I've got a process that I've come through for this class and I walk to it in the document-- and we'll go through it in class as well-- on how to take those cars and get some scripts, break them down into the right formats that you need-- because they're all arc and design materials-- how to convert them into standard materials. Then export them and get them into InfraWorks and use them as part of your library. It's free content that you already own. There it is. And they're really good cars too.

So what I have here is I came up with a couple of really simple objects. And you probably have seen similar types of things like this before. This is just a simple little 3D object that gives a general idea of how an object will look with different kinds of materials applied to the surface.

And I placed several of them into this scene to give you an idea of the different types of materials, and how they've been applied to the scene, and what does and does not work. So you can bring this into InfraWorks and see what it ends up doing. So an interesting thing-- so for instance like this object here. We have a TGA. And this TGA has an alpha channel.

Now, when you're working with a TGA inside of 3ds Max-- and please forgive me if I don't work this through on SketchUp, but I'm pretty sure they're similar workflows with that, and Rhino, and Maya-- when you assign material to a surface, say in 3ds Max, and you have alpha source. So inside my viewport here, down here on the bottom. I wish this projector was a little bit better. You can see this thing called alpha source.

And if I go ahead and select "None", you'll see that the original material is there. In fact this is what the original material looks like, it's just this checker pattern lines, magenta and cyan. But there's an alpha channel here as well to explain it.

And if I go ahead inside of 3ds Max and they say, hey, the alpha source is off, it doesn't knock anything out. If I tell it the image alpha is on, then it goes ahead knocks everything out. And you can see the original material here without the diffuse color on it is just blue by itself.

So you can say it's almost like a decal kind of process. Cool to have a decal. And here's a good example of a decal process over here. I just wanted this surface here with a window. It's like the side of an aircraft or something. And this is just a cut out little piece. So if I were to take this object right here-- I'll just make a duplicate. We'll go ahead and put it behind here. Click OK. And in this case, it's knocked out. But if I go ahead and turn this on-- I have my opacity map, you can kind of see behind it. So you see something behind it. And it was designed to be more like a cut out here.

So anyway, that just allows you to be able to see what the original diffuse color is-- [AUDIO OUT] and be one step further. Sounded like my mic cut out there for second. I'll go ahead and turn this back on. Where are you, you bad boy.

So when you're dealing with the material inside of 3ds Max, you have your ambient, your diffuse, and all your different color channels that you can see here. And you can not only have a color assigned to it, but you can also have a map dropped into the channel itself. And you can go ahead output something. And when I built this, I decided to see what each one of these would come out as. So in this example, I'm going to take all these objects minus you.

And there's two things about them [AUDIO OUT] so that the materials do this little rotation thing here as well. And we'll see how that works with COLLADA, and so on, and so forth. So you look at them here with 3ds Max. I'm going to go ahead and export these. Export. There we go. And we'll go ahead and go to models. And let's just call this samples.

And when you're exporting a file from 3ds max's FBX or [AUDIO OUT] There's going to be different options available to you here. [AUDIO OUT] is I usually have at least smoothing groups checked, preserve instances, and one of the other important things is preserve edge orientation. Usually these three checkboxes-- nothing else that's going to be in there, like turbo smooth or any of that stuff is going to really matter to InfraWorks-- but it's good to have at least those three options checked.

In fact preserve instances is key, especially if you have a scene that has lots of repeating objects. So let's say your object, which is a lamp pole-- and it's a particularly ornate one. And each one's about 5,000 polygons, and you need to go ahead and replicate it with some sort of bridge structure that you're [AUDIO OUT] With all that extra geometry [AUDIO OUT] is say 150 megabyte FBX file, because you have all these really ornate lamp holes there. Like instance it's going to say, oh, this is an instance of every lamp. It's going to load one instance and then just a couple of kilobytes for each addition instance to reference back to the original point say, OK, but I'm in this point in space. And so 150 megabyte FBX file, which by the way would be gigantic, is now down to say 10 megabytes or something like that because it doesn't have to have 50 versions of that lamp-- individual ones in there.

The other option that's really important is this right here, embed media. Now the reason you want to embed a media element with FBX is because if you don't, you have to make sure you go get those maps. So who here put all of your maps into the same channel for your projects? Raise your hand. Exactly. Yeah. You've got them spread out to this library here. Maybe you poached it from this project over here. And they're spread out all over the location. And what happens when you want to send your file to your client, or your colleague, or someone else? You have to go through and collect all that data.

Well, by embedding the maps, it's going to take the original format that you used-- TGA, TIF, PNG, whatever-- it's going to embed those inside the FBX file. When the FBX file is then opened in InfraWorks, it's going to essentially extract it, take the binary data for the geometry itself, and it's going to create a subfolder. So if it's called lamp.fbx, you're going to have a subfolder called lamp.fmb. And it's a folder, and it's got all of your maps inside of it. So it's always best to embed. Yes?

AUDIENCE: We've had SketchUp stuff [INAUDIBLE] then they would send over their work in a zip file and they wouldn't have the bitmap and stuff. I'm like, well, you need to send those to me, because I got to put those in a library in order to see that. But will this embed it automatically?

MARK KAUFFMAN: This will automatically embed it for you. So depending on the application you have, it'll open the FBX. It's actually part of the FBX standard. You guys are familiar with Word. There was the old doc and then there's the docx format. The docx is like a container version that contains an xml file as well as the doc file itself. This is kind of a similar type of thing, it's an xml wrapper for FBX that can contain multiple elements, which is good. It's kind of like zipping it up, but it's more generic to that. And it'll open in any application that can open FBX I think 2009 or higher-- I could be wrong about that. If there's any Autodesk people that know? I don't know if there's any Autodesk people here.

So anyway so we have this different format. The other thing that's also really, really important-- and this is more of a 3ds Max, Maya type of thing, because they're going to be able to support the newer versions-- but if you look at the actual FBX plug-in that's associated with it-- so this says the version 2016.1 release-- you have the ability to select older file formats.

So in this case under Advanced options here, I can go ahead and go to FBX file format. This says version type binary, just leave it as binary it makes a smaller file. The other thing is you have the ability to select the version of the FBX file. Now, this might be important to use the newest if you want to say, send to Mudbox or send to Maya.

But if you're sending it to InfraWorks, do not select 2016, because it'll look at it and say, I have no idea what you are. And while the InfraWorks team has done a really good job of implementation of FBX, they haven't gotten up to speed as much as the DCC applications are for Autodesk stuff. So make sure it's at least 2014-2015 and older. In fact, 2014-2015 is perfect, that's the sweet spot where it supports a lot of stuff.

Go ahead and click OK. It'll export my file. And then what I'm going to do for this is I'm going to bring it in as an actual object in the scene from my data sources. And I'll go based on the notion that all of you know how to use InfraWorks for the most part? Good, OK.

So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and load the scene up. I'm going to import my 3D model. Navigate to my folder. And it is here. Where's my samples? There we go. Go ahead and click Open. And again, the model library types, 3ds, DAE, DXF, FBX, and OBJ. DXF pretty obvious why you probably wouldn't want to use that. It's not a particularly useful file format, unless you've got an older CAD model that you want to bring in-- you don't care, it doesn't have any materials, it's good-- and you've got an older version of CAD that can't do anything except DXF and DWG. Why can't you important DWGs as a 3D model is beyond me. I mean you can, but it's whatever. And 3ds, don't use 3ds. Just don't use 3ds.

All right. So, I'll select my sample. So go ahead and click Open. And it does its little thing. I have to go here and say, hey, it's in the right place. I need to go to-- come on, you can do it. There we go.

Now, whenever you import-- and you'll know right off the bat whether the file that you worked with was in the right scale-- is this right there. See where it says XY-M? If you worked in a scene file in feet, inches, centimeters, et cetera, et cetera, it's going to say XYIFT, which is international feet or XYFT, which is US Survey feet, and so on, and so forth. You'll know that, for this, if you're just importing it is a data source it's OK. If you're importing it as a library element, bad. So it's important to note.

So in this case, yay, we were in meters, were good. We don't worry about coordinate systems here, we're going to use this interactive placing, because I just want to place it in the scene so we can take a look at. So I'll go ahead and do that. Interactive placing, loading model-- bam, there we go. Click OK. Type, city furniture, there we go. Close and Refresh.

Now another thing I highly recommend-- and this is dependent on what your specifics are for this object in your scene-- Hold on, fast fingers. So when you first load your 3D model here, and you could take a look at it-- by the way don't use this as the absolute reference for the file. This doesn't always show it the way that it really, truly is coming in. What you see in the viewport inside InfraWorks is the real deal. That's the most important thing to remember here.

But this is also very important here. Right here, it says Material Handling and it says Auto Adjust. Come on, there we go. Now, this is very important. If this is an object that needs to be the hero object, something that needs to be good, high res is all the time, and is not going through and doing auto adjust-- so what this is dealing with is level of detail-- unless you have a model that has a custom level of detail, so LODE0, LOD1, LOD2, and you can specify that using custom melody-- and that way you can say here's the three FBX files, and different ones-- and it'll automatically swap them out for you.

Otherwise, InfraWorks is going to do your level of detail. And oh, boy, does that suck really bad. So nothing against the team, it's just they're doing something quick and dirty. And think about it.

Three years ago, something like that, we built an InfraWorks model for the main stage. And they wanted us to build the entire state of California. Now think about it, aside from Google Earth, which doesn't count because it's a very unique kind of application, when's the last time you built an entire state of content? And not just high level, don't get any higher than say 75 miles above it. We're talking all the way from the top of the state, down to LA basin, down in the downtown, and being able to see things.