Is Your InfraWorks Model Stale? Animate Objects Within InfraWorks.

TODD ROGERS: Good afternoon, guys. Hope you all are enjoying your AU. Thanks for getting to my class. I see some familiar faces. A lot of people I don't know.

So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking an inanimate object from Trimble Warehouse, 3D Warehouse, and bringing it into 3ds Max, animating it, and sending it over into InfraWorks.

So my name's Todd Rogers. I'm the BIM manager at Walter P. Moore. I just started there this year. I was in the channel for a while. Decided to go back into production. If you don't mind, silence your phones.

A little about me. I've been using software since '90. I have an 18 and a 16-year-old, both boys. I have an extreme addiction to Harley Davidsons. That's a few of them. I got a couple more since that picture.

Again, I'm BIM manager for Walter P. Moore. I am an Autodesk expert elite. There is a few of those in here. Let's see your hands, expert elites. All right. So they'll be able to answer any questions you have. All right?

So there are a few animated objects within InfraWorks, if you don't know, right out of the box. There's that wind turbine. And I think that's it. Isn't it? Just the wind turbine.

So after this we're going to be placing it as city furniture within InfraWorks. OK? The best presentation can be exported out video for better presentation purposes. This demonstration, we're going to be obtaining models for animating.

Also covered is how to animate the models and bring it into InfraWorks for your daily use. So in this I will guide you how to navigate through the Trimble 3D warehouse, which used to be Google's. We'll import it into 3ds Max, animate it, export it out as a COLLADA file, and attach it into InfraWorks with the interactive placement option.

So this is a no PowerPoint zone. OK? It's kind of ironic that I show you a PowerPoint to tell you that it's PowerPoint free. Right?

So do you know why God made snakes before lawyers? He needed the practice. Anybody know who said that? No? Jimmy McGill. Otherwise known as Saul Goodman, cause it's'all good, man.

All right. So let's jump right in. If you go out and you go to any search engine and Google 3D Warehouse-- 3D Warehouse SketchUp.com comes here.

Has anybody ever been to this website? Good. Good. So you know there's thousands upon thousands. I mean, I found moonshine steels in here, all kinds of stuff.

So what we're going to be doing today is a helicopter. Hopefully you all got my email with the handout and data set so you can try this out yourself. But I basically go in here and type in helicopter, pick one I like.

Now, my personal preference when I go in to download these things, I like to hit the 3D model and see if it actually looks good. I picked kind of a crappy one here for an example. But you can see what it would actually look like with material.

So this isn't a very good one. We're going to be working with a little better one than this. But my personal preference when I go to download these, I always download the 2014 Version. I've had issues downloading the newer ones. So I usually go with the older version. Sometimes it's better to open it in SketchUp and export it out of SketchUp as a COLLADA before you bring it into Max. But I found that Max '19's pretty good with conversion.

So in that data set I've included-- so if I go to Import, Import, and I go to my file here. And I've already got the SketchUp downloaded.

Now, here, the pawn importation, the only thing that you want checked is to Skip Hidden Objects, and Split Objects By Layer. That's the only two you want checked. Those are not checked. By default you have these over here checked, and not these. So make sure you reverse that order.

And it does not take long. And as you can see, it comes in rather well. Holding the Alt key down and your wheel will enable you to orbit fairly easily. So what we're going to be animating here is the rear rotor and the top rotor, whatever that's called. The blades.

So in order to do that, you will see that sometimes when these models come in, it does split up these elements. That's fine. So we need to join those together. So to group them together, we would hold the Control key down and start picking the ones you want in the group.

So I want to pick this one, this one. And if I zoom in here a little, you'll see I want to get this and there's this thing. Nope. We don't want that. There's this here, this here. And that should work just like that. Don't want that one. All right.

So then we go up to Group and Group. And I'll just call it Rear. Click OK. Now you'll see that one object there is all together. All right. So we'll animate this piece first. So the first thing I want to do is make sure that my 3DO snaps are set correctly. So if I right click on my 3DO snaps here, the only two ones I want checked are pivot and vertex.

So once I have those two checked, then I could come up here to Move and select this. And you will see where that UCS icon is there, the gizmo.

So the gizmo is already centered where I need it to be. So I don't need to move it. If I did need to move it, over here on the right I would want to go over here and affect the Pivot only. OK? That only allows the gizmo to move. It does not move the part itself.

So that way I can reposition it. And it would snap to the vertex, or what's the other one? Vertex and pivot. Pivot point. So obviously that's a pivot point.

One thing I do want to do first is come over here to my modifier list and check Smooth. So I want to go down to get smooth. And I want to check Auto Smooth.

Now, when this process was first done, Willy Campbell from Autodesk had a good workflow for this. He was supposed to be in here. I don't see him, though. He had a good workflow for this. But there was a lot more steps involved in between this, converting to editable mesh, and doing this and that. I found you don't have to do that. It works just fine doing it this way. OK?

So once you have that established there, what you want to do now is animate it. So we hit the Rotate button here. So with this Rotate button, the first thing you'll do is you'll slide this key bar all the way to your right. Once it's slid all the way to the right, you're going to turn on Auto Key. So what that does is it creates a key automatically. Right? So it's a key frame, by the way.

And this yellow thing here, you see it moves in the negative or positive direction. Now, depending on which way you want your rotor moving is which way you would want the rotation to go.

So you want to move it until it's all the way at or around 360. Right? So once I do that, and I hit the Play button, you'll see it's rotating. Right?

Now, that doesn't look very well. Does it? It's whirr, whirr. Whirr, whirr. You don't want that. You want a nice, smooth rotation. Correct?

So in order to fix that, what you do is I'll stop that, and I'll right click on it and go to the Curve Editor. When I go to the Curve Editor and I zoom out on this thing, you'll see the reason it's doing that is cause it actually has this nice curve in there. So we don't want that. We want a straight linear path to it. So all I do is I select it like so, and I hit the line right here to set them linear.

Once I do that and I hit Play, you'll see it's a nice, smooth rotation. Right? And that's what we want.

All right. So that's the first one. Now, there's a couple of different things I want to show you here. You can see the speed of it. It's kind of slow. I don't think a helicopter's rotor really moves that slow, or it wouldn't get up off the ground. Right? Well, this one would be the same. Right? This is when it gets it off the ground. So if I stop that, you'll see that key frame it created over here.

What I could do is I can move this key frame down closer over here. And when I hit play, watch this. So it only picks up that first little piece. Right? But you can see it's going to be a little faster.

So the trick is, in that Curve Editor, before you do any of this, is right here are the parameter curve out range types. So there's different types of range types. You can test the one that works best for you. I like the relative repeat.

So if I select that, I would have to redo this. But what it does is it keeps that relative repeat there. If I were to set that parameter and then set the key frame back, it would have been spinning really, really fast. OK?

So we'll go with the top here. So the top. And hold the Control key down. And I want that spinning. And I think there's some other components in here. Yep.

So I want that. And there we go. There's that one I'm looking for. All right.

So once we've done that, we're going to group them. So this will be the rear. And we hit the Move. Now, you can see that gizmo is not where I need it to be. It's over here.

So again, I want to toggle on Effect Pivot Only, and move this thing over here to where it'll snap. There we go.

Oh, you got to turn your 3DO snap on in order for it to work, by the way. There we go. Looks pretty close to the center.

So once you have that, you can untoggle it and rotate it. So again, we want to go top view here. We want to grab this yellow line. And we'll go the reverse direction this time. It'll be a negative 360.

But guess what I forgot to do. I need to take my scrubber bar to the far right and hit Auto Key. Then move this. Make sure you get 360. Sometimes you got to move all over the screen to get it.

And test it. Notice, both of them's moving. Right? So both of them's moving simultaneously. That one's nice and smooth. This one's not smooth. So we got to edit that in the Curve Editor.

So we got to right click. Go to the Curve Editor and select it. And make it linear. And test it out. Dun, dun, dun.

All right. Any questions so far about any of this? It's fairly simple. Right? You don't have to be a Max expert at all. I am far from a Max expert. I promise you.

So after you have that done, what you could do is come up here to File, Export, Export. You want to make sure you have COLLADA DAE selected as your export file format. And we'll export that. Call it Heli. And click Save.

Now, this is important here. Under your animation extra options, or your bake animation now-- so it used to be under extra options. Under bake animation, if you check bake animation, you got to. OK? You got to do it. Otherwise it's not going to animate inside of InfraWorks.

Now, depending on your model size and how complex it is is how long it'll take to export that out. And you will get some warnings. I usually just close it and don't read them, cause it makes me try to figure them out when it really doesn't matter.

So once I have that, fire up InfraWorks. And let's see. Which one do I want to open here? I want to open a particular one for you guys because I got quite a bit of animation inside of it. But I'm not seeing it.

OK. That's fine. I'll just go ahead and open this one. So this is downtown Houston. So George R. Brown, of course. This is the Toyota Center. Here is the Minute Made Park over here. And here is my office.

So real easy, guys. Come in here to our data sources. And we want to make sure we choose 3D Model. Go to the desktop and grab that heli. Click Open. Double click it.

Here you want to make sure it's city furniture, and interactive placing. Once you do that, double click to place it. Hit Close and Refresh. And there you have it.

And looky there. Something didn't come out right on that. But it's so easy. You can redo it. Right?

And, again, you can speed that up like I was telling you how to speed it up. So if you want to see that, we can do it real quick, cause we ran through that pretty quick.

There's some other things I want to show you too. But if we go back in here, let's just reset this.

So any questions about any of that workflow? All right. Pretty easy.

All right. Let's see if I can get this right with the speed here. All right. Remember, first, you just group these together.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: It might have. Yeah. We can test it right now.

So let's name them both Rear. Right? Oh, that's what I did last time? Oh. That's why I wanted to test it.

[LAUGHING]

All right. So we got that. Go into Rotate mode. Well, first you got to smooth it right.

And now, notice, I didn't do the smooth on the top part earlier. It still worked fine. So maybe you don't even have to do the smooth part now.

What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah, I did. But rotate. And it's already in the right place. 360.

Oops. Forgot my key frame.

So here, if I got this right, we go Auto. And we do this beforehand after the animation part. So it'll create that key frame. Bam. All right. Curve Editor here. Relative repeat.

All right. So if I move that key frame, it should speed it up. Of course. It works every time before you get the AU. Right?

Yep. So maybe what we'll do is we'll go another route here. So if we go back one more-- there we go. One more. There. All right.

All right. So that was [INAUDIBLE] here. And that, 220.

OK. We're keeping it the same speed. All right? I can't get that to work. So we'll just maintain that same speed there.

So Auto. Nope. Curve Editor. Turn that off. All right. Group this one. And we don't want to call this one rear. Right?

So you can see me struggling here with Max. Again, I'm not a professional at Max, by any means. But I do this quite often, for just little things.

So move. [INAUDIBLE] Say again?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: No. I didn't. Thank you.

All right. Here. Auto Key. Back to top. Rotate. Ah! Don't forget to uncheck that, or you'll have that happen.

All right. Forgot Auto Key. OK. [INAUDIBLE]

And this is what happens if you don't get it right on the center. Right? I don't know if I'd want to ride in that thing or not.

But just to see if this thing worked right for us, let's export it out. We'll overwrite it. And let's delete that.

I really wanted to show you all this one model I got. There it is. Yay. [INAUDIBLE] finished.

That's not it. So this particular model has several different types of animation I've done inside of it, just so you can see the capabilities you have. And it was just here.

OK. This is it. So you can see this was a pretty easy one here. If you'll sit here for a second, you'll see the airplane come by there. So he goes out into the wild, blue yonder, and makes a little curve up here.

Anybody, have an idea how I did that? Feature line Out of Civil 3D, I just created a feature line, and just raised it up off the ground. Brought it into Max and used that as my flight path. That simple.

So bring in that helicopter there. So 3D Model, Desktop, Heli. City furniture. And place it.

So we've learned a valuable lesson here today, ladies and gentlemen. Don't name your parts the same.

[LAUGHING]

Thank you for that. I had no idea. Thanks for that catch.

And if you want to see it done faster, email me and I'll figure it out again for you. Cause I figured it out right before I came here. Tested it like three times, and I forgot how to do it. But that's the way it goes. Right?

Oh, I wanted to show you something else in that model real quick.

You ever noticed that recently? If you're in it, and you get out of it, and you go back to hit the execute again, it doesn't execute.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Big surprise.

OK. So one other thing I wanted to show you here is somewhere in these mountains we have some more animation. There it is. There we go.

So this is also done in Max. I can't see the resolution all that well from here. But the wheels are actually turning. It's pretty neat.

That's a hell of a work around, by the way. Has anybody ever attempted that work around? Oh, it's awful. It's an awful workaround. Cause you got that dynamic shift in 3ds Max. So you have to take that, and you've got to reverse it. So if you're negatives, you got to make them positives when you bring it into InfraWorks. Also, you have to add 3203 to everything to convert it from metric, back in.

But it works. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yes. That is correct. So if it's a small area, you're good. If it's a large area, you really have to play with it. Cause it will not come in. So you'll have some that look right. And you'll have some cars driving off into the air. You'll have some under the ground. So be careful with that.

I got some YouTube videos on it. One more thing here, and I'll cut you guys loose is on my YouTube channel. I've got this workflow on my YouTube channel, by the way.

But I wanted to show you one I did at one time. It's kind of funny. There it is.

So this is when I first started playing around with it. It's just an eight second video.

[LAUGHING]

But yeah. I did the records in Max. And I did the Halo guy in Max. It looks a little better on here. It's not shaky like that. But any questions?

All right. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah. You absolutely can. You absolutely can. You sure can.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yes. But because the reason is-- well, the main reason is that it creates a COLLADA file. And it creates a materials folder. You got to drag that COLLADA file into the materials folder. So I'd rather just bring the SketchUp model and be done with it.

Used to you had to, because the SketchUp model didn't come in right. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: That's correct. So actually what happens when you export out of Civil 3D, if you export a corridor out or a feature line, you can use parts of that. So the feature line comes from the corridor, or just a feature line.

So if you want to see that real quick, I can show you how that comes in. Profile fire up.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Sir?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah. So I'm doing a class on civil view, where we bring the corridor in, and all the points are there, [INAUDIBLE] the feature lines of a corridor. So those are all selectable to give offsets of different objects to place along the road.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah. So in the object placement in Max, what it does is it asks you for a path basically. You select the feature line, and it reads it vertically and horizontally.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Oh, yeah. I see what you're saying.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Correct. Correct. I've never tried that. But it sounds like a good workflow. I'm don't know why it wouldn't read [INAUDIBLE].

I like your hat, by the way. World champions. Right there. Boston Red Sox, this guy right here. Woo!

All right, guys.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TODD ROGERS: Yeah, I know. Hey, listen, man. I live in Houston. And when they were playing the Astros, I was like--

[LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHING]

TODD ROGERS: Guys, y'all are more than welcome to head off. I appreciate you coming. And check out my other class Thursday. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]