Using InfraWorks 360 for Better Site Logistics

DON JOSEPHSON: All right. Welcome, everyone. Well, I don't know about you guys, but coming to Autodesk University always inspires me. It inspires me to want to do more to change the industry. It inspires me to want to ask the right questions, to look at things from a different angle, and to question why we do things a certain way, and to ask why we can't do them differently. My hope today is that in the next 90 minutes I can do my part to inspire you to do things a little different.

I hope that you will learn from my successes, as well as my failures, and move forward with new ideas of how to push software to the limits, and in this case in particularly, InfraWorks. Now, there's no doubt about it that what we're going to do and what we're going to be talking about today falls into the category of a hack. We'll be using InfraWorks in a way that it was never designed for.

As stated in the class description, InfraWorks was created to allow designers and civil engineers to plan and design infrastructure projects in the context of the real world. That means that we'll be using some of these objects in ways that will stress it and push it to the limit, and we won't even touch other parts of the software. We will Frankenstein together information from different sources into a viable professional logistics plan that can be a foundation for a well-thought-out and visual plan of attack for each and every job.

I'd like to tell you about the kind of person that I am. I've been in the commercial construction industry in Portland, Oregon for 12 years. I spent seven years in the field, and the last five have been in my current role as BIM manager for the Oregon office of Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty company. I am passionate about BIM. I am passionate about statements like measure twice and cut once and a penny saved is a penny earned. I've always been fascinated with the manufacturing and construction process.

As a speaker at my high school graduation, I chose to speak about people like Henry Ford and Eli Whitney, who were pioneers in manufacturing. I'm the kind of person whose favorite book growing up was The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. I grew up on a farm, and we had to MacGyver countless things to keep our worn-out farm machinery running. Innovation, construction, passion-- it's in my blood. That's the kind of person that I am.

Now let's move on to my company. I work for Howard S. Wright, which started in Seattle in 1885. They were acquired by Balfour Beatty in 2011 and became Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty company. Notable construction projects include the Space Needle, and more recently, the renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt building from 2011 to 2013. At over 4 billion a year, Balfour Beatty US is one of the largest construction companies in the United States with its parent company stationed in the UK.

Now that I've told you a little bit about me and my company, I would like to know about you. So by a raise of hands, how many BIM managers are there in the audience? OK. Thank you. How many of you have used InfraWorks? OK. Good. How many of you guys are involved in site logistics planning? And how many have you been frustrated with trying to build a background for your plan, complete with trains, buildings, roads, et cetera? OK.

If your answer is yes to the last two questions, then you're in the right class. So let's talk about our learning objectives. There's four learning objectives. The first one is to understand the reason to use InfraWorks in conjunction with SketchUp, Revit, Bluebeam, et cetera. The second learning objective is to create 3D backgrounds using Model Builder, and then to add, move, rotate, scale objects in that scene, such as equipment, building, roads, fences, people, vegetation. And then finally, to produce presentation materials, such as storyboards, images, and VR capable models.

So learning objective one-- why should we use InfraWorks? So to answer that question, let's take a step back and discuss the end goals of the site logistics plan as well as three other workflows for producing site logistics. As we begin with the end in mind, we can make the entire process more efficient. Some of my goals are as follows.

Be able to create a realistic background with textures, the ability to add excavation, automatically generate buildings and terrain, allow addition of equipment, fences, building, et cetera, reduce the effort to create the professional results so that we don't have to model everything in SketchUp every single time, and to be able to show phase construction.

And unfortunately, something that InfraWorks does not do is produce the 2D plans for tower crane layouts and things like that. So it's important to understand that we need to use each tool for what it's best at. InfraWorks isn't going to be able to replace every other workflow that you have. It's an additional tool in your tool belt that needs to be used for the things that it does well. So you're still going to need to use SketchUp, you're still going to need to use Bluebeam, you're still going to need to use Revit.

There's a lot of things that would make me want to use Revit solely, but we'll talk about some of those things here. But its ability to do documents make it a really viable solution as well. So let's talk about the first workflow, which is using Bluebeam. First of all, you can do PDF markups. Excuse me. Bluebeam review has become a staple for most design and construction companies in the United States. It provides easy to use PDF markup tools with a very intuitive interface.

It is the perfect solution for marking up 2D plans or a Google Earth image. Pages can be scaled, making it easy to make sure construction equipment from your tool chest are the appropriate size relative to the other items in the document. I have seen people, including some of our superintendents, do amazing things with Bluebeam. But as good as it is at what it does, Bluebeam is not a 3D model creation tool. It can be used to markup 3D images. It can even handle small 3D PDFs, but those 3D PDFs must be created in other programs.

So if you want 3D models for your site logistics, then we'll need to look beyond Bluebeam. However, Bluebeam still plays a critical role in the InfraWorks workflow in three ways. First, it allows a lot of the site logistics issues to be worked out in a 2D plan, which is much faster to change and play around with than the 3D model. Second, this process also allows our superintendents, who are almost always adept at Bluebeam, to take the lead in producing the 2D side logistics plans.

Third, once we have a workable 2D plan, this plan can be easily exported as an image and imported into InfraWorks as a train overlay, which we'll talk about more later. So I've listed some of the pros and the cons. So again, it's easy and fast. You can annotate on top of these drawings. You can use both PDF plans and images, like Google Earth. But the down flows are, like we talked about, it's not a 3D tool, it's a static image, and it does have limited fill patterns, although it's not that big of a deal. But it really just comes down to the fact that it's not a 3D tool. And if your goal is to make 3D images for your site logistics, then it just doesn't cut it.

So here's an example of a 2D plan. This is how most of our logistics start, is by just starting to-- with the RFP, if we do get plans, we can incorporate those. Sometimes we'll cut those up or use Photoshop, and then be able to pull the floor plans into these overlays as well. So the next workflow that I've used a lot of is SketchUp. So you can pull in information from the contract drawings, you can overlay, you can import CAD files, and you can push files over from Revit via DWG, and you can use the terrain geolocation information to actually site the buildings.

And then you can push those back over as a KMZ file into Google Earth as well. But the biggest issue I have with that is you can't delete anything. You can remove the buildings to a certain degree, but you can't add excavation and there's some limitations with what you can do pushing those back into Google Earth. So SketchUp's appeal lies in several factors. Modeling in SketchUp is easy and flexible if you use the grouping tools and are careful about snap points. Who here uses SketchUp?

So as soon as you understand the grouping and that it's surface-based modeling, then SketchUp makes sense. If you try to use it as a 3D modeling tool, then it can be pretty challenging. You also need to understand that the snap points are always snapping in 3D. So if you're trying to do a 2D plan and snap appropriately, you get some weird stuff going on. Another major thing that's great about SketchUp is it has the geolocation, which has the drape site imagery. And it also has a large library of equipment models that can be accessed through the 3D warehouse.

The drawbacks are simply that InfraWorks does it better in several different ways. So here's an example of a Revit model pulled in as a DWG, overlaid in. And then you have a few SketchUp components in there as well, such as the tower crane, the concrete truck, and whatnot. Here's an example of a SketchUp model getting pushed back into Google Earth, which can work for a lot of things. Workflow 3 is about using Revit as the base.

Revit can produce the 2D dimension drawings, which is one of the best advantages of Revit. It's always to scale. And if you can get models from the architects and engineers, it can be a quick and easy way to produce things. It has great rendering of view control. The site components do snap to the topo surfaces. But one of the biggest things I have with Revit is a lot of time I don't have a terrain model from the architect. We might get a Civil CAD file later on, but as the RFP stage is going, very seldom do we get a Civil CAD file.

So as I've learned more about this InfraWorks process, you can actually create a 3D terrain file, push it into Civil 3D, and export that as a Civil CAD file, and then bring that in and do your topos in Revit through that way. So even if you use a Revit workflow, InfraWorks can be part of that. But I've also found that there's no road tools in Revit. So if you want anything to drape on the surface, you have to pretty much draw it using either the sub areas for the terrains and then you have to apply those different materials.

Or if anybody knows how to do draping an image on a terrain, I don't know how to do that. If there's a way, that would be cool, but I don't know of a way to do that right now. And it also has a much smaller library out there for equipment. So even if I do it in Revit, I often will open a Revit family, push in a SketchUp model, and then push that in as a Revit family. So another thing that really was one of the main things I wanted to figure out was how to do fencing on a slope site, rather than having to manually place barriers or things like that. And even if you use the wall tool to produce a barrier, you still wouldn't be able to follow the terrain.

So here's an example of one of the things. And this one, actually, we pushed through Photoshop as well. But you can see with the rendering, you can get some really good results, but it can be very time consuming. In this instance right here, to create the floorplans, I actually used the floor tool to create the sidewalks. And then I used another floor tool and just offset that. And then to do the lines, I used walls that were 1/8 inch tall and just drew the walls in because it was so much faster than trying to use the topo terrain.

So that worked great because for this presentation, it was just a flat site and I wasn't worried about the terrain. So there's definitely options there. But as you can see here, all the surrounding buildings and the context has to be done manually. So that's another reason that pushed me towards InfraWorks. So let's talk about InfraWorks. So again, you can see, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can pull in. That's where I'm talking about Frankenstein'ing this whole process, is you can get a lot of data from a lot of different areas and bring that in and compile it into one common model.

And then there's the ability to push that out as an FBX file into-- we use Fuzor for our VR processes. There's other ones out there, but we use Fuzor. So in this process, you can see the Model Builder was the big thing for me that piqued my interest. I took a class here at Autodesk University a couple of years ago about InfraWorks. And it was pretty amazing to me, the whole thought of something that I'd been trying to do for a long time magically happening for me, where the terrains would come in, the buildings, the roads, the waterways. And as I got into InfraWorks, it has the sky and a lot of other things.

The visual rendering just within the software itself is pretty good. So it almost eliminates that step of having to do the rendering. I usually just take screenshots directly from-- or export images directly from the information there and don't have to worry about doing any type of rendering. So another thing, like I said, trying to be able to get fencing to follow the terrain. So the barrier tool does that perfectly. And you can use coverage areas to do excavation, and it automatically creates roads for you.

Another big thing with InfraWorks is-- not that I would recommend it, but you can do up to 200 square kilometers of an area, rather than the limit of SketchUp is 1 square kilometer. So if you have a bigger area that you're needing to do, you're going to max out the limits of SketchUp pretty quickly. And if you've ever done a big model in SketchUp, it can bog down pretty quickly.

It also has the ability to do proposals for phasing. Terrain overlays was another really cool thing that we discovered that I'm going to talk more about here. So some of the downsides of InfraWorks is that it doesn't have the ability dimension drawings. It wasn't made for site logistics. It's different than AutoCAD and Revit in the way that you navigate and move and rotate and scale objects, which was a little bit cumbersome and challenging at first. And one of the big things that I have an issue with is you can't hide individual items. The ability to hide and change and select objects is pretty limited.

So I hope that they see the way we're using the software now and be able to make some changes there. And of course, there's no sectioning tools. So if you want to show the interior of a building, you have to prep that in Revit or SketchUp, and then bring that in as already a sectioned building, and then create a new proposal, delete the full building, and then add the sectioned building in the same spot. So it can be cumbersome in several different ways. But again, the there's a lot of benefits to use it as well.

So now that we've gone through the goals and the workflows that have led me to use InfraWorks, I want to show a few examples of some of the final results. Here you can see a completed scene. As I said, this is a Frankenstein view. We have the background created in the InfraWorks Model Builder. Then on top of that, we have two buildings produced in SketchUp with materials applied. And then we have a 2D terrain overlay produced in Bluebeam, and cutout building from ReCap Photo, and trees and other objects that were either native to the software or brought in using the style palette.

Here's another look at that same proposal. This is for phase two of that job. One of the things I like most about InfraWorks, though, is the barrier tool used for fences. And with the terrain, as you can see here, the terrain overlay resolution is pretty high. Whenever I export images out of Google Earth, I have-- Google Earth Pro is free now. So there is an export tool there, and you can get a pretty high resolution image out of that. I try to zoom in as close as I can and still do everything that I need to. That way, I can maximize the resolution of any of the files I bring in as a terrain overlay.

So a lot of time, I'll end up just using those images as my roads, rather than trying to deal with modeling the roads to match the actual conditions. So that's one other area where we have simplified the process and made it. So we still get good results, but don't have to model anything. Here's a close-up of our loading area. And by doing 3D models, I can take screenshots anywhere I want.

I don't know how many of you guys have ever worked on a still image, and then the superintendent comes and says, no, I wanted it at a different angle. And you want to just scream because you he doesn't realize that that means you have to actually start from scratch because it's all a static image. With the model, you can create an infinite number of images at any angle without any work. So if they want to see it from a southwest view instead of a northwest view, it's easy for you to accommodate that.

Some other important factors in considering InfraWorks is the resolution. So just even without doing a terrain overlay, the background image that you can see on the left was created using the InfraWorks Model Builder, and the map that it uses is the Bing Maps. And by default, the train tile setting is set to 17, but you can up that to 19. It goes from one pixel per 2 point something meter squared to 0.1 meters squared. So you can increase the resolution about five-fold, so you can get some pretty good results.

And in the same image here on the right, using SketchUp geolocation, that's zoomed in as close as I could get on that area before I took the picture. So huge difference in resolution capabilities. And to take that one step further, when you bring a topo surface in in SketchUp, it gives you a terrain surface, but doesn't tell you the actual elevations. You could use surfaces set at every two feet to actually create contours, but that still doesn't tell you what that contour is because it just sets it at the 00 elevation.

By default, the Model Builder has true world elevations built in, and you can toggle the contour lines on or off per your preferences. Buildings are another factor. So you can see on the left-hand side here, this is a default building created from the Model Builder. This is a building created in SketchUp, and then materials applied using photos. And then this building is created using ReCap Photo, which we'll talk more about here in a second.

So to go along with that, for years I was using the buildings that you could pull directly off of Google Earth. But then they started to do the LiDAR flyovers and do the full mesh with the drape, and it created much better results much faster, but there's no way to export any of that out. And I would look at Google Earth and I'd just be like, that's what I want for my background, but I can't get it. We've already talked about the limitations of bringing the models into SketchUp or into Google Earth, so I was really frustrated with that whole process. And so that's what drove a lot of me wanting to explore this whole process here, was how to overcome that obstacle.

So just for fun I took a picture in Google Earth. This is the Sands Expo Center, and this is what is produced if you could bring Google Earth into your background. But even with how good Model Builder is, this is what the Model Builder produced for the exact same area. Still pretty impressive. That's a far cry from having to start from scratch, but it's still not quite there. So that's where ReCap Photo comes in. And again, I think this is just getting started, but here's a picture from a drone flyover we did on a job. I have it as a movie, but I don't think I'm going to play it. I think this tells the story.

So we went out, we did some capturing of this data. And then we were able to bring that into ReCap Photo. And I'll go into ReCap Photo during the instructional demo a little bit more. But we're able to produce these meshes. And the other thing that-- I guess the big epiphany for me that I got real excited about with this class was being able to export those high res images out of Google Earth for the floor plans, I thought, well, why can't I just create my photogrammetry model out of those high res images as well?

So I have basically two sources of photos that I use, either the drone flyovers using-- and I'll talk a little bit more about some best practices for flyovers as well. But the other thing is, if you take flat images and then do some angled images, you can create really good photogrammetry just off of Google Earth as well. This one is completely from Google Earth. And this one, also from Google Earth images. You can see how nice these models can actually be if you take the time to take good shots, get close in.

So I've been pretty happy with the results. Another thing that's important about that is you have to scale. Because it's a photogrammetry, there are ways that you can georeference that or put it in a particular coordinate system, have it survey controlled. None of mine have been able to do that. So I'm usually on the fly-- I got three days to get something out for a proposal. So a lot of time I'll scale it just by taking measurements from Google Earth, and then that gives me my scale. And then when I bring it into InfraWorks, obviously it's just a manual alignment process from there.

So with this being an instructional demo, that's basically everything for the slideshow. So now we're going to switch gears and go into the live demo portion of this process. So the first thing we're going to talk about is learning objective number two, which is the Model Builder. To do the Model Builder, first of all, this is only available in the InfraWorks 360. I'll just skip that part. So you have to have InfraWorks 360. Get out of here.

So then it brings into your startup page here. And you can--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DON JOSEPHSON: Thank you. So when you come into the home page, if you're on InfraWorks 360, the Model Builder tab will be here. So if you don't see the tab, it's because you're on just standard desktop InfraWorks. So you'll need to make sure you get the InfraWorks 360. Then you navigate to your AOI, or your area of interest. And again, it's best practice definitely to only get the area that you need because we add a lot of detail, especially if you start adding trees or things like that, and the model can start to bog down. So you want to get just the right amount of area. You want a small area as you can and still accomplish the site logistics plan.

So you can change right here to an aerial view. And then you get the area that you're going to go with here. We'll just grab downtown here for fun. So I'm just going to grab some random area here. I'm going to get it really small because of the demo here. And then you enter a name. You place it in the appropriate folder, and then you create the model. And then it will send you an email when the model is done. And obviously, the bigger the model, the more time that that takes.

So after the model's created-- we won't wait for that one. We'll imagine that this is the one that we created. It comes in, and the first thing you have is a master proposal. So the roads, the buildings, this is exactly what it'll look like at the default here. It looks like it's having an issue with my background image here, which you can fix by changing to Bing Maps. And then here's the resolution. You can get to that several different ways.

So right now, by default, it's set at 17. But if you double-click on the ground imagery and you go to Raster here, that's where you change the tile level from 17, which I said is 1.19 meters per pixel, and then at 19, it's 0.20 meters per pixel. So it's roughly five times higher resolution. So once you click that, you hit Close and Refresh, and it will update the tiles to the higher resolution. So that's really pretty much all there is to getting started with Model Builder. Like I said, it's the closest thing to a magic wand we have starting our backgrounds for our site logistics plans.

Another important concept is having the master proposal. So as a Civil design tool, it was intended to have not phasing of site logistics, but to have multiple different design options, if you will, similar to Revit. It was created so that you could have a master, and then you could show the road or the bridge being built this way, or you could show the road or bridge being built that way, and go from one proposal to another in a presentation. So we use the Proposal tab for the phasing.

And so the idea is, there is a merge. Not everything can be copied and pasted from one proposal to another. So say you forgot something, there are ways to copy stuff from one proposal to another, which took me quite a while to figure out and a lot of pain. But roads and terrain overlays are two-- any of the surface layers and terrain overlays do not copy from one proposal to another, which can be a real challenge if you forgot something and then you wanted to move that forward.

So there is a workaround to that, and it's the merge proposals concept. So if you have the master proposal as basically your existing conditions, then you can take two different proposals and merge them together. So that way, you always have the master proposal that you can pull up into another model. So if you don't delete any of those objects, you can always get them back by using the merge proposal. A little bit of a weird workflow, but it works. That way, you can push terrain overlays or roads or any of the other surface layers into a new proposal.

With that in mind, let's talk about bookmarks. So for the bookmarks, for those who use SketchUp, it's very much like scenes, except there is one difference. The scenes are specific based on what you have hidden and whatnot. These are not proposal-specific, so if you have different phases, you have to be in the right proposal first to get that right view. It's just a camera position, basically. It's not dependent on what proposal you're in.

So that can be a challenge. If you're trying to do a video or something that shows phase one, phase two, phase three, you can't really do that in InfraWorks right now. You have to do the same video for each proposal, and then edit that in other software. But it can be helpful if you want to just take a picture, switch to a different proposal, take a picture. The bookmarks allow you to have that exact same camera angle if you wanted to see progressively the structure being built or something like that.

So another important aspect of the Model Builder is the roads. So again, it's a little bit outside of the scope of this course, but they come in generically. Let's just go through this a little bit here. So there's styles. The way that InfraWorks works is everything is a style. So if you come down here in the Style Palette, you have roads. And when I first started using InfraWorks, I wanted to click on something here and then start drawing that, which you can't do. You have to use the tools over here to place objects. So if I wanted to draw a road, I have to click on this and then select my style.

But over here, you can't change the styles. You have to come over here first. So let's say this road right here, I don't have any green space on that. So if I wanted to change that, I'd come over here. Here's the style. And most of the time I leave all the default ones the way they are and I make a duplicate, which I've already done right here-- called it Road 1. So I'll double-click into that. And then I can change this however I want. So just for fun, we'll do a couple of things here. So here's a green space. We'll get rid of the green space.

And by default, it goes left and right. So if I want it to be not symmetrical, you can change that and tell it exactly what's on the left side and exactly what's on the right side. You can also adjust the number of lanes simply by clicking on this button here. And then you can change the width of any of these objects, you can change the materials. You can add-- if I had a parking, for example, I could come in here and add a lane for parking.

And then I could make that part of the roadway. And I could tell it that that's 8 feet long. You can also-- another cool thing is with the curbs, you can offset stuff so that there are different angles. So you literally can have a 6 inch curb or things like that in here as well. So I'm going to just change that to roadway. So now I have a parking lane in the right spot, and then I can export-- then I could change. So I'm going to hit OK here. And now that I have that selected, it's going to change this road.

So now I could do two things here. I could change the road style right here or I can grab this one and I can hover over the road and it'll change it to that style. So now you can see-- and obviously there's some cleanup you got to do. By placing it in different spots, it acts differently on the joins, similar to Revit and walls. You have to tweak those and get everything to align. So there's a lot of cool things that you can do with roads. And these are all what they call design roads.

The way that the software was built, and again, one of the things that we probably use very much, is you can change these to component roads. And what a component road is is instead of everything being unified, you can then start hacking up the road. You can add turn lanes, you can add a different type of sidewalk in it for a stretch of it. You can really get into a lot more control for the road. It adds the stations. But that's beyond the scope of this class, but I just want to make you aware that's out there.

So if you want to learn more about it, you can google the component roads, and it'll tell you all about it. Terrain overlays are another part of the background aspect. So to do a terrain overlay, you go to your Data Sources. This is a really important tab to understand how this works. And you can bring in a raster image. So when I'm in Bluebeam, when I'm happy with my results, you export that as an image, and then you bring that in as a raster image. So it shows up here in the terrain overlays.

And as you can see right here-- so I'm in the master proposal, and the terrain is not shown because I didn't put it in that proposal. Terrain overlays are proposal-specific. So if I go to this first proposal that I created, you can now see that that terrain overlay is inside of here. And if I can go to the model explorer, right now you can see that I have that terrain turned off right here. So there's the terrain overlay. But let's actually place that.

So if I go back to Data Sources, I'm going to reconfigure that. So let's just imagine that I brought that in just barely. And you can see right here that I have-- everything is interactive placed here, and the scaling is important as well. A lot of time they'll come in pretty big because of doing the high resolution images in Bluebeam. So if I wanted to configure this, again, I'll double-click. It's set as a-- sorry, the wrong one. That one was created by me playing out with the point cloud, trying to get it in here. So here it is.

So I'm going to interactive place this. And you can see it automatically comes up with my mouse. And you can see that it's already been scaled here when I first brought it into 0.1. And then when I place it using interactive placing, I get it close. And then I double-click to place it. That took me a while to figure out, too, that you've got to double-click to place. And then you close and refresh. Always close and refresh. If you OK, it doesn't place it. And then I'm going to turn that back on here so I can see it.

And then we'll manually locate this. So for ease, I'm going to turn off the buildings. And I'm going to click on my Terrain Overlay, and I'm going to set this to 50% transparency here. And then I can come in here and I can see the other background. And then I can move this around with the gizmos. And you can see the building that it's lining up right there with. I'm using this building right here. And then you get it in there, and then you can use these scale tools to adjust the scale.

And then you just work at it till you get it placed where you want it. There is-- if I right-click on this, you can place by reference points. You basically pick a point and then a matching point, and you do that three times and it'll place it in there. Personally, I haven't had-- it feels like it gets in the way as I'm trying to do that. And if you don't have a very high resolution background, it's hard to pick matching points, personally.

So I've found that just scaling it and putting it in by eye has worked the best for me. And then once I get it where I want it, I usually then turn it back up to 100% opacity. And then I can turn my buildings back on. And then I can fine tune it based on how it aligns with critical components of my site background.

So let's say I wanted to make a change to that. So here I am in Bluebeam. I'm going to add a control point here. And I'm going to let my pedestrians walk right through my site here. So now that I have an update, I can then export this as a JPEG. And then I overwrite the file that is loaded into the model. I hit Save, Replace. And then I simply go to Data Sources, and I right-click on it and I hit Refresh. Let's turn off the buildings here.

And I must not have the right file in here. But it will update and come across. Let me see here. I copied and pasted stuff to different folders, so I might not have the back one. But that's the idea and it does work. But that way, if your superintendent makes a quick change, you can update that 2D background, pull it in.

And then what I do is I basically use that as a tracing tool, and I can then trace all the 3D objects over that 2D background. It also really allows you to add some annotation that wouldn't be possible otherwise, and allow you to really show traffic routing using the Bluebeam arrows and pedestrian walkways and stuff like that that is a challenge otherwise.

So let's dig more into ReCap Photo a little bit. So as I said, let me show you a picture of the-- so for photos, it's very important to get your true plan view pictures and from different angles, because as you move around, you can start to see the edges of the buildings. So that really helps define the top of the whole thing. And photogrammetry works by the overlap of the buildings, and then uses trigonometry to stitch all those different images together.

So they recommend 60% overlap photo to photo. And then if you're doing a flyover, we use DroneDeploy. And you can do your flyover using that tool. And then also, all the buildings of interest, we do a fly at the same elevation. Probably about 250 feet, at let's say, at a 45 degree angle. And then we also try to do another fly slightly lower elevation at a little bit steeper angle, like 30 degrees or so, so that you're trying to get the sides of the buildings, if you will.

So by doing those three different passes, we found that that makes a lot better photos. And take those same concepts if you're doing still shots of Google Earth, you want to do that same pattern. You want to do the flat, and then 45 degree. If you get the horizon, it really throws the ReCap Photo for a tail spin, if you will. It makes the model a lot harder to stitch together. So you really want to be focused down at the object that's of interest.

So I've had substantially better results as we've taken more care in getting the images correct. You can see as you go around, you're taking pictures and you can see how this could be stitched into a model. So as you pull the models in or to start a new-- the other thing that I do is even though this says aerial here, if I'm doing one of my site plans-- I've tried the aerial. I've had a lot better results creating my site backgrounds using the object. It's just a really big object, but that's the whole concept, is that you're working around it in a 360 degree circle rather than the 2D plan.

This one's more for excavation where you're trying to do a cut and fill, that kind of stuff. So when you pull the file up, there are several tools in here, in particular, some of the most important ones are the scaling tools. So like I said, that affects the export because it bases the number of pixels by the size of the file here. So you can set the scale on the units. So feet and a value here. And then I'm going to go and pick two points here, and I'm going to tell it that that's 60 feet or whatever your dimension is that you've matched in Google Earth. And then you just set the scale of your object here.

And then you can adjust. A lot of time I'll come in-- and you can see that this is plan north, not true north. So we've rotated it. And I use roads or other things like that, the sides of buildings, to align it. And then you can use the cropping tools, either the lasso or the tool here. And then you can crop the files here. I'm going to invert this and delete everything on the outside. So you can do a lot with the mesh to get down to what you want.

And here's an example of that, where my co-worker was able to cut everything out but this model. And then we pulled this model in, and we'll be pulling that in as part of our demonstration here. So a lot of cool things. A couple of things about the exports. So you export the model here. There are several different options. There's point, if you want to pull it in to ReCap as a point cloud. There's the ones that we use-- the default ones, the OBJ file, which works pretty good. We've had success with the FBX file as well.

And I've been told that FBX is more compatible with other softwares. So we've played around with all of them. We've had success with both the FBX and the OBJ. And then by doing the rebake, again, that's supposed to make it more compatible with other softwares, maintain the materials and whatnot. So a lot of what we've done there has been reading up and trial and error to figure out what the best solution for exporting these has been.

And then you can bring those in as-- so two things. One, if I was going to bring this in, I would configure it as a building so that I can hide it and unhide it with the buildings. If I brought the entire model in right here, I would not bring this in configured as a building. I would bring this in configured as something else because I want to be able to hide and unhide this separately then the buildings, because it can get in the way is basically what it comes down to.

So what I do is I pick one of the-- you only have so many layers, if you will. So I'll use something that I know I'm not going to use for something else. For example, the point of interest or the pipelines. Now, again, that's not the way that it's intended to work. So again, we're hacking it here because I don't have the ability to add ReCap Photo background as a layer that then I can turn on and off on my own. I have to use the existing layers here. So we put it into something I know I'm not going to be using for site logistics. That way, I have control for visibility.

Scaled match, we exported it. So to import and configure-- I have one in here already. So again, all of the imports-- it comes to the data sources. So it's an OBJ file or an FBX. Either way, you bring it in as a 3D model right here and you navigate to the object. And it comes in unconfigured, and then you just simply have to configure it. Let me pull the buildings on here. So I've already pulled in a SketchUp model here, and same way it was pulled in. And if I want to understand what is going on with that one, I can go back to the Data Sources.