Gaming the System: Combine AutoCAD Civil 3D, Revit, InfraWorks, and Game Engines for Sites

ANDY CARTER: My name is Andy Carter. I co-own a small civil engineering company in Austin, Texas. We're two years old. I am a Professional Civil Engineer in the state of Texas.

This is Gaming the System. We are going to try to tie every program that you've got in your infrastructure suite together to get some beautiful stuff. That's kind of the intent. So we're going to a little bit of Civil 3D. We're going to do a little bit InfraWorks, a little bit of Revit, going to talk about some game engines.

We're going to dive into one that's proprietary, but I think is really easy to use for those that are looking and shopping for an answer. I don't get any endorsements from them. I'm just telling you what we've messed around with and where we've gotten. And, at the very end if there's time, I'm going to jump into yet another game engine that I've just started playing with and show you where our workflow goes from there.

I speak really fast. I have gotten comments before at AU that Andy speaks too fast. I prefer to teach over people's heads or teach them fast and over their heads. Because what's going to happen is, in about two days, you're going to sit back and you're like, oh, I remember he said that. It's going to come by real fast.

I think the write-up's pretty solid. And I go through the workflow a little bit slower in the write-up. I'm going to mimic it exactly. The data set that I'm using is on the AU site. And you can try to replicate as much of that as you can.

I do this in all my classes-- big class, please turn your phones off. I get kind of thrown off if it rings-- or at least put it on silent. I respectfully request that you hold all your questions and interjections to the end. That kind of throws me off pace. I've run through this at my house about 8 times to try to make sure I can squeeze it into an hour. And if I get thrown off I don't want to lag, because I know you want your beer.

Let's keep going. I'm not going to read this. Y'all have read that before. I don't want to suffer through PowerPoint. I'm going to tempt fate and do as much of this live as I possibly can. I hope you appreciate that. It can either be a raging success or a gargantuan disaster. We'll see which way we go.

What are we doing in this class-- develop quick workflows to create compelling and cost effective visualizations. I'm a five man firm. I have small budgets. I have clients who do not want to pay me for visualization. My goal was to create visualization with a high level of fidelity as fast as I possibly could. I started migrating toward game engines. That's why I'm going to show you what we did.

Let's establish a model based design-- we're all doing that now anyway. And you probably don't realize how close you are to being able to ingest that into something to make it very attractive and visually dynamic. Some of you probably do.

We're going to composite Civil 3D data coverages. We're going to use InfraWorks, not as a final product. And I'm slowing down to say that, mainly because I don't think InfraWorks is an end destination right now.

There's probably somebody on Autodesk whose blood is boiling when I'm saying that, but I'm saying, as of right now, it's not mature enough. It will get there. And there's no doubt in my mind it will get there. But, as of right now, I think it's an intermediary broker where we aggregate surfaces and coverages and get things together so we can take it one more step.

It was like you would do a rendering, and then you would move it into Photoshop. I kind of see InfraWorks as a place where you put all your stuff together, you export it, and you move it into something else for polishing, spit-shining, putting vegetation, materials, textures, that kind of stuff, on it. That's my workflow as of right now. I think that's going to change in the next five years. But, as of right now, that's where we're at.

Enough, for those who do I don't know there is a Infrastructure Design Competition that's done every year. These are the big boys. These are million dollar firms, these three, multi, multimillion dollar firms. This is us. This is CivilE. This is five guys that did a site rendering. And we did it without the client actually paying us for it, and it took a couple of days. And we won the Small Project this year. So, what I'm about to show you is the exact same workflow that we did to win this prize.

OK, we're going to a smaller site, granted, because I can't do a 19-building apartment development within an hour. But it's going to be the same exact workflow. Actually-- and I haven't really told anybody this-- we're doing this site, one right on the corner, which is a commercial, retail kind of outparcel. It's real data, real site, real survey.

So the goal is to get complex Civil3D designs into a game engine. We've already gone over that. Everybody knows-- well, a lot of people know how the game industry works. And I think we're kind of running parallel to it. We don't realize it. They kind of do a three-tiered system.

I've got a friend that did the SMU Guildhall. It's a game development system. And they break it into three tiers. They've got artists-- guys that sketch up and draw models. You know, this is the way that we want things to look. They've got programmers at the far end-- guys that are cranking out code and making sure that the physics of things work, that the guys running down the hall write. You got these guys in the middle.

And this is kind of a niche industry now, but these are level builders. These are guys that are building worlds, putting things together, making sure that the three-dimensional level that we're running around is right, and that the curve is there, and the grade inlet, and that kind of stuff.

Strangely enough that's us, now. And we haven't really realized. I think we kind of stumbled into it. We're level builders now. Got your land planners who are doing your landscape architecture coming up with a big vision. The architects do that, too. Civil engineers, we get all that data, we get our hands dirty, and we build the level. Right, we grade it out. We say where the trees are going to be with the landscape architects input. But we are level builders now. Autodesk is kind of a programmer. They're the guys that are figuring out the code to make all this stuff work.

Why does it matter now? And you all know, I've-- HoloLens's on the floor. You've seen a lot of people with Oculuses. If you can create 3D content in real time, you will be king in two or three years. Because you can ingest it into systems that are being built as we speak.

So, the Revit guys have kind I've already taken hold of this. They've realized that they can dump it out. But if you can create compelling Civil work, you will be able to ingest it into some kind of real-time system, a HoloLens at Oculus, whatever you name it. It's all coming out in the next few years. That's where the hardware is.

So, we as civil engineers, architects, designers, we need to understand how to get our data ready for this tsunami storm. How do we ingest it into something where I can let somebody experience it on this level? It doesn't have to be a headset. This could be on a screen. It could be just a projection of it. But we have all the tools now.

OK, I'm going to get out of this, because I don't like PowerPoint, nobody does. So where am I going to start? I'm going to start in Civil3D, as everybody does. And, actually, I'm really just starting a plain-Jane AutoCAD. So this is the site plan that we're dealing with. I've got pretty much lightweight, polyline, AutoCAD line work. I mean, it's just boring line work. That's the stuff that we start with. So we start with just a traditional AutoCAD land plan, 2D.

Where do we move from there? So the next step and probably the single most important time consuming and complicated step. If you are really good at grading, this workflow is brilliant. If you are terrible at grading, you don't even need to touch this workflow. So if you have a deficit in grading, grading is going to be your impotence to try to accomplish this task.

So, if you're not good at grading, you need to start investing heavily in understanding how to do feature lines, and infills, daylights, and targetings, and all that kind of stuff. And I'm not teaching that in this class, because I can't. I mean, I can teach it, but I don't have the time. But if you can't grade, you need to learn. And it needs to be contiguous. And you don't need to cheat, because I've seen a lot of people that do grading and cheat like, oh, we got this far I'm going to do the rest by hand. I think those days are waning, and it's going to be a problem later.

This is a 10th a foot contour site that I bammed out really fast. Technically, it's not ADA compliant. This site plan will not work. And I knew that, but I was just trying to get it done just so I had a data set.

So you can see a building slab. We've got some stairs. We've got some relatively mild but it's about a 5% grade. It's coming around that curve return. This is the surface that we're going to use and try to get it into a game engine for site rendering. We've got some stairs. That's the ADA part that's not right.

So I'm going to close that. And we're going to jump over to InfraWorks. And I've already built two things. The first one is I built the existing ground. I'm doing everything in Texas Central State Plane, which is what I deal with in my neck of the woods. I've already set all the InfraWorks up, and I brought an aerial. I am not using anything that's cloud-driven.

I don't go grab it from the model builder. I do all my stuff with the data that I can find. I feel like I get a better fidelity for that. I bring in the terrain, I bring in the aerial, and I get going. So what I need to do is I need to get my proposed grading out-- the detailed grading that I did with all my brake lines and feature lines-- and I need to move it into the existing site. Going to go back into this, and we're going to export that as an imx file.

So I'm going to go to the output tab, on the ribbon. We're going to say export imx file. And I'm going to-- back up a second, give me just a second. I'm going to set up a folder-- you can see how many times I've run it-- just to make sure I do this right.

I'm going to do a New Folder, and we're going to call this _AUrun08, make sure I did that right. Yeah, that'll work. OK. So I'm going to dump out this imx file. We're going to say export imx. And it's going to ask if we want to save it before exporting. I'm going to say no. I'm going to say d: colon-- nope, excuse me-- slash underscore-- this is the rough part. Once we get this, we'll be good. Let's see if that works.

And that's pretty fast. All right, it's gone. Surface is in State Plane, because we did all of our Civil design in State Plane. Our CAD line work was in State Plane. Everything's on the same coordinate zone.

So I'm going to jump back into InfraWorks. We're going to get that surface in. Go to the little ideal. Y'all probably know how to do this, I'm just showing you what I'm doing.

I'm going to import an imx file. I'm going to go find that folder that we just created, which is Run8. We'll find the imx file. We'll say OK. And I'm going to a graded site. We'll configure it. Right-click to configure.

This is the part that if you skip it you're going to be really unhappy. InfraWorks likes to do this convert to grid. I don't know if y'all have noticed that. For existing ground, that's fine. For detailed proposed grading with hardcore feature lines and whatnot, that's terrible. It's going to ugly up your surface. So make sure you uncheck that-- close and refresh.

And that's going to take longer than it should. InfraWorks is a little slow to refresh probably because I have too big of an existing ground surface, at this point. I'm not going to go through every refresh, but we'll let that gin as it goes. And let's see where we're at. It's going to have a bit of a time.

It's kind of hard to see. I don't know how clear it's coming up there. You can see that site is aggregated in. So it's stacking it on top of the existing ground. And InfraWorks has the ability to meld and merge surfaces and sometimes to your benefit and sometimes to your detriment. So how will you grade those edges is going to matter about how that ties in. And I think those that have played with it-- I see some heads nodding-- kind of know that.

Back into to CAD-- OK, old school AutoCAD hatching-- everybody remembers you couldn't have donut holes and things couldn't match and whatnot. InfraWorks, to my understanding-- and someone could correct me if I'm wrong-- you cannot have donut holes, right. You have to create like those old school hatching patterns for coverages. Same thing applies here. I don't have any situations like that. But for those that are trying to replicate it on their own projects, you're going to have to create closed polylines.

OK, we're back up. What we're trying to do is we're trying to create coverages to drape on that composite surface of the EG and the FG. And I want five or six of them to get this to work. It's going to be asphalt. It's going to be curb. It's going to be retaining walls, building slab levels.

So what we're doing is we're trying to use the coverages to drape and paint over the surface on a site. And as we stack them up on a site, we're trying to use that as an intermediary to paint, OK, this is where the ribbon curb is. This is where the asphalt is. This is where the parking stripes are. And we're using InfraWorks-- which is a very powerful tool to do that-- to effectively be the one to do that.

So what we've done here is we've taken that site plan and we've created closed polylines of all the things that we want to create coverages from. And those coverages will be draped on the composite EG and FG surface. First, what I'm going to do-- so I'll do a MAPEXPORT command, which is one of my favorite all-time Civil commands, because it saved my butt so many times.

I'll go to Run08. And I don't want it as reshape file. I want an SDF, because that's just a little cleaner between Civil and InfraWorks. It's not cleaner between any other two programs in the world that I know of. But between Civil, and InfraWorks, and SDF is kind of the way I like to go.

The first one I'm going to do is I think I'm going to call it 00_site. And that's going to be the property boundary I'm going to select manually. This needs to be closed polylines. Under the Options tab, Treat Closed Polylines as Polygons Feature Class, we're going to pick polygon. And selection, we're going to pick it manually. And I'm just going to pick that site boundary. And we'll export it. There's the first one.

OK, I think we've got six or seven. I'm not going to do all of them. I'm going to do a couple just so you can kind of get the point. Usually the first time you're like, what's he doing. The second time is, I kind of get it. The third time, you've got a mastery of it. So I'm not going to do things more than about three times if I have to on this tutorial.

MAPEXPORT-- second one we're going to do is asphalt. It's 02_ASP. Pick OK. Select manually. Pick the object. Treat closed polygons as polylines. And polygons and we'll say, OK. That's the second one. And I'll do the third one for the mastery.

So you can see the retaining walls-- they're hard to see. They're these blue beasts, as I highlight over them. There's three of them. So I'll do that one just to fini-- well, yeah, let's do that one. I'll finish it off.

MAPEXPORT, and we'll call this-- that's probably going to be like 0405. And I'm going to call this walls. We'll say SDF still. And I'm going to select it manually. We're going to say, Treat Polylines as closed polygons. Make sure that's polygon. Selection-- select it manually. And I'll pick one, two, and three. And we'll say, OK. I think we've got that one.

Now a little word of advice, if you're doing something that's got a vertical face-- and this is in the write-up-- I recommend that if you're doing a projected overlay of a closed polygon that you overshoot it. So if you've got a wall-- that vertical face-- you need to offset it a foot or so on either side. Mainly, so I can get that texture to drape fully down the face.

If you do it right on the top, it might get confused and not know where it is. That's something that we spent a little bit of time kind of overshooting. So for curbs, for building slabs that are vertical, for retaining walls we'll overshoot a coverage as we're exporting it.

So I'm going to jump back into InfraWorks. I'm going to add that site boundary first, and I'm going to do-- again, I'm going to bring in three of them. So we're going to have to suffer through InfraWorks refreshing three times. And then I'll jump past it, and we'll do it another way.

First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to import that coverage file. I'm going to do the site. We're going to say, Open. Right-click on Site, and say configure. We're going to make it a coverage. We're going to do a drape, closed polyline, polylines as polygons-- it should already know that.

And I feel like there's one other thing we want to do. That pencil, which is your material-- I like to just go in there pick color and pick something that's kind of close. We're going to clean this up later in post when we get into the game engine downstream. And I'll say, OK. And we'll say, close and refresh. And we suffer through InfraWorks refreshing again.

All right, that's just kind of the way that it goes. InfraWorks is not fast. It doesn't update quickly mainly because I probably have that aerial and that heavy EG in there. Let it do it once. I'll bring in the next one.

So I've got all this draped greenery within the limits of the site boundary. Because in the end we're going to get in a game engine, we're going to call that terrain and put leafy grass on it. But that's why all that is what it is.

And you can tell I've got a grading problem here. I'm sure somebody saw it-- that little spike. That's in the resource files. Sorry, it's just one of those things.

I'm going to add another SDF. We're going to add the asphalt. And we'll say, OK. We'll right-click. Say configure. Again, a second time you're starting to get used to it. Type is Coverage Area. We're going to drape it. And we're going to change that color. And we're going to make it an asphalt-y color. We're going to make it almost black-- it's something. I'll say, close and refresh.

So surfaces have a hierarchy in InfraWorks, and we all know that. You've got the EG. You've got the FG. And you kind of stack them up as to which one wins, which one's on the highest.

Coverages do the same thing. So grass is at the bottom, asphalts on top of that, curbs on top of that. Parking stripes are on top of all the pavement. You kind of work your way up as you go. And you can kind of see that hierarchy as we get in close-- and can see that that boundary for the asphalt is still asphalt. Grass is grass, obviously. I bring in building slab, sidewalks, retaining walls. There's about seven of them that I'm using on this site.

Let's bring in the retaining wall just so I can show you that one. And that will be the third one that I'll make y'all suffer through. We will do walls. I'll say, OK. We'll right-click on it, say it configure. We'll make sure that, again, is a coverage and it's draped. Coverage area, we'll do drape. And we're going to pick a color that's just dumb just so y'all can see it, purple. Say, close and refresh.

And I want you to look at the over-draping, the overshooting, that we're doing when we create a coverage and try to put it on a wall. I like it to be a little further and past the toe of the wall and extending a little further out. Anything that's vertical needs to do this.

Now InfraWorks when you apply a material can't really, very well map vertical faces. It kind of smears it, streams it down. I'm sure some of y'all have seen that. When we get downstream into another program, it's going to solve that problem. So you can see-- let's see if I can get it right on top of it. It's a tiny bit of overshoot. I mean it's almost so subtle you can't see it, that it's kind of past the toe of the wall. It's important step, it's something that we fought. That's the only reason I keep beating on it.

Parking stripes-- show of hands who feels like they successfully have solved signage and striping on pavement materials? There's at least one, two, three, four. I mean, those that have played with it-- and we fought it to death. We were putting in like stupid things. We were putting in roadway alignments for parking stripes to try to solve the problem.

And I had this epiphany just in the middle of the night. I was going, it's a coverage, right. I mean, everything that's a right turn arrow, and a parking stripe, and all that it's just a coverage. So stop beating your head on it. That's all it is. You just need to go in AutoCAD and create effectively the painted area.

I'm going to show those that don't know how to do it really fast. I like to use Quantum GIS mainly because I'm a five-man firm. I'm cheap. And it's free, and it's good for simple GIS tasks. I'm going to fire that up, and I'm going to show you how I do parking stripes. And this is in the write-up, as well.

So I'm going to go to the graded site plan. Sorry, we'll just go to the plain Jane site plan. I'm going to do a layer isolate, and I'm going to pick all the parking stripes. And I've screwed something up in this file. So I'm going to turn layer 0 on, as well. I'm just going to explode that, and explode that. That's what's going to zero. Oh, going to erase, because I don't want that van marking.

And I'm going to explode that hatch, that ANSI 31 crosshatch just because that's technically a parked, painted stripe, as well-- going to do a map export. And we're not going to do an SDF this time. I'm going to do a shape file. And mainly, that's because I like to use Quantum to do the buffering. You can do it in AutoCAD Map. I just don't like doing a lot of geoprocessing in AutoCAD Map. I'm not comfortable there. Some people probably are, I'm not.

So I'm going to do a map export-- again, my favorite command. It's not an SDF this time I'm going to do it as reshape file. And we're going to call this stripe. And I'm going to put it under Run8. And we'll say, OK. It's going to say, I want lines. We're going to select them manually. I don't really need any of the data. I just want the line work. We'll say, OK.

Get into Quantum, which I already had open, going to add a vector file. We're going to browse. I'm going to find Run8. We're going to pick that stripe shaped file. We'll say, OK, and open. So, this is how fast it is in Quantum.

Geo processing tools-- we're going to do a buffer. I'm going to buffer it 0.2 feet-ish. You know you're shooting for a four-inch stripe. You know your cross stripes might be different. If you're really doing this on a high level detail, you might actually want to get your stripes in the right distances. I'm just trying to do them all on one pass to be done with it.

The buffer distance-- I'm going to do 0.20 feet. We're going to say, Output Shape File-- I'm going to put that under run8 again. And I'm going to call it stripe buffer. And we'll say, OK, and OK again. So everybody just understand what I just did, just buffered the line, right-- created polygons out of lines.

So if your land planner's giving you just straight lightweight polylines for your parking stripes-- and why wouldn't they, because that's easy. This is what you would do to convert it to get it to overlay on that drape surface. So, I'm going to close Quantum. I'm done. I won't go back. Discard that. I don't need to save anything. And we definitely don't need it open twice.

So if I go back into InfraWorks-- like I was saying, parking stripes are coverages, right turn arrows are coverages, stop bars are coverages, everything that's painted on to the pavement is a coverage. And it took us awhile to come to that simple conclusion. And I've seen, I mean, there are books written by Autodesk writers and they're showing you how to do parking lots and they're using repeating textures. And it just seems silly. You know, it's just a coverage. I mean, just let's get over it. It's a coverage draped on the surface. That's all it is.

So I'm going to add that shape file. And since that's a shape file and it was brokered through Quantum, it's lost its spatial intelligence. So it doesn't know what coordinate zone its on anymore. But we'll fix that, because I just happen to know it's on the same one. So we'll say, configure. I'm going to do coverage-- if I can find it.

Geolocation-- notice it's lost. I know it's on Central Texas State Plane, which is what we play in. I'm going to drape it. I'm going to pick a color. That color is going to be white-ish. That's fine. And we'll say, close and refresh. And it seems so-- when you see it, you're like of course, right? I mean, that's what half the stuff at AU-- you kind of look at it-- you're like, oh, that totally makes sense. It's easy. They made it easy for us.

So there's our kind of ganky-- I'd probably spend more time on my handicap markings. But there is effectively the striping. And it's just a coverage. That's all it is. It's pretty simple.

Next step, trees-- trees are problems. If you can create good trees that are beautiful on your site rendering, you get a beautiful rendering. And every landscape architect will always tell you that, right-- beautiful trees, beautiful renderings. I spend a lot of time on trees. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on trees in this tutorial. I like to have a different point per species.

And I don't know if y'all know but the Academy Award two years ago for Technical Merit-- you know you can watch Academy Awards and they get to the technical section, like they gloss over it in like 20 seconds. And everybody in this room it probably pisses off, because that's all the stuff that's relevant to our industry.

A guy will invent some camera-mounted gimbal that can stabilize videos that are shot, and he wins. Two years ago a group called SpeedTree won. And SpeedTree does fractalized algorithms for trees that are slightly, they're similar species but they're slightly different. And they're in every movie that you've ever possibly seen.

And the trees are beautiful and when you show it to a client, they don't go, well, that tree's the same as that tree, right? Or, they're slightly the same scaled tree. No, they're actually, genetically, slightly different because of the fractalized algorithm. And that's why they won the Academy Award. It's so simple.

But it's like, that's what I want to use. So I would look to-- if people are taking notes or writing it down, I don't think this is in the write-up. Anything that uses SpeedTree is probably a good thing just because of the way it looks.

So, InfraWorks doesn't use SpeedTree. I'm going to bring in trees in a very, very simple, watered down approach. I'm going to go back into InfraWorks. So surveyor surveyed all the trees. I went in and deleted all the ones out that we're killing, or I put it in a different point group.

These are all the ones that are surveyed to remain. And they're just the standard, AutoCAD-- they're Civil 3D point description key set tree, doesn't matter what it is. It's just a point. I'm going to say export Civil Objects as SDF. The only Civil Objects in this drawing right now are the point trees. Because if you do this and you've got surfaces and a bunch of other stuff in there, it's going to dump everything. So I'm going to say, export. I'm going to say, let's see-- make sure we put that under Run8. And, that's fine. Save, OK, Done.

Back in InfraWorks, we're going to add that SDF file. That SDF file is going to be for trees. We're going to add that. Right-click on point say, configure. Now keep in mind these are surveyed, positional trees. That's important. Because a lot of times we do renderings we just spray trees on it. In my experience, it's better to actually know where they are, to actually have a physical, contextual relationship as to where it is.

I'm going to pick trees. I want to make sure this is draped. Drape it, and I'm going to do a rule style. And we're going to pick a-- I like that tree. I don't know why.

Now, these are not SpeedTree's. These are the same static tree over and over again in the same rotation. And it's the same species at the same scale. You can write scripts to change species in scales, but you still got the watered down, InfraWorks-y trees with that alpha textured-- I won't get into it. I don't like them. But it's an easy way to show them and contextually in the right location. And you can always create your own object and ingest it into InfraWorks if you're a real good Max user and get something better.

OK, so that's what we've done to get InfraWorks to that point. I'm going to jump to a proposal that I've set up that is completed. And it's really not much more than we just did, just a couple of more coverages. But I'm going to zoom in so you can see it-- asphalt, curb, building, walls, sidewalk, and textures, trees.

So now I need to get it into something to start cleaning it up so I can ingest it into a downstream game engine. What I'm going to do-- for those that don't know this, it's pretty obvious. It's pretty simple. I'll go to Settings. And there's this export on the left-- I don't know if you can see my cursor-- Export 3D Model. And that will export an fbx file out of InfraWorks that we can get into a game engine.

And that's going to look as ugly as we've created in InfraWorks. But it will be able to ingest in of the third-party real-time Viz system. Do a bounding box. We'll do that. And I'm actually going to export this. And we will import this into Max.

And I want to show you a problem that we've recently run into that I've been talking to some guys at Autodesk to try to solve. We're going to skip a step, because I wasn't able to solve it. I just want to say it in case y'all run into the same problems. And I think I know what the issue is. And anybody that's not in the United States is probably not going to have the issues. So that's a hint.

Export it. Make sure I put this in the right place, because I have a tendency to not. We'll do D. We'll do Run8. And we're going to call this Site. Take that T off. And we'll say, save. I just want you to see how long it takes, because it's really fast. I mean, it's a pretty-- even with a detailed EG surface, it's still pretty fa-- it's done.

So let's go into Max and take a look at what we just exported. So we'll say, File Import. And I'm going to import desktop-- if I can find the D: drive. I don't want to change the name of the drive. I just want to grab the file. Come on, come on-- Site, Site.fbx.

And this really irritated me when I did it the first time. I got bonsai trees, little, tiny trees, right? And I think what it is is that I'm in a foot unit and it's a metric issue. It's because everything seems to be scaled about a 0.30.

So if you're bringing in assets that are native to InfraWorks and you're working in a coordinate system that's in feet, I've seen a lot of the assets scale. Strangely enough, I didn't see this problem in 15. I saw it in 16. And I don't really understand why. I've actually got 15 installed in my office, 16 installed on my laptop, and I saw it here first. So I'm not sure what's going on. But I have seen it.

So I just wanted you to see it. So if you're trying to replicate these workflows and you say, I don't have a solution for it other than go get the old version. Use it or do everything in metric-- for the guys that are in European countries. They shouldn't have this problem.

But there we go. So, everything's in Max now. I don't have the building. So where do I get the building. I pick up the phone, and call the architect, and I go, hey, where's your Revit model, right? And they go, oh, we don't work in Revit. And I go, I don't work with you anymore, and I hang up the phone.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

But, I mean, it's funny. But it's kind of getting to that point, right? If you're an architect that's not working in Revit, why are you still in business? Right, because you shouldn't be, in my opinion.

I'm going to jump over-- it's just like a Civil shop working in LDD, right? You're a sinking ship. You know. The boat is burning.

Let's go back over into Revit. So, in this case, CivilE built it, because we didn't have the Revit model. We actually are lucky enough to have a guy on staff that's a Civil designer, that actually knows Revit, and knows it decently. I don't. I'd like to, but I'm running a business and it's kind of hard to delegate my time. So I'll yield to him.

But he built something quick and dirty off of the floor plan that we thought the building was roughly going to match. So there's the Revit model. So I need to get it ready for someplace that we want to show it off. Something that looks a little bit of higher fidelity than InfraWorks does.

I'm coming back to Revit. I just wanted to show you that we'd actually have that model. I'll make a jump back.

So, here we are in Max. And I told you that I kind of have to cheat here and jump back to the one that was exported out of 15. But I just wanted you to see the problem. It's going to say, New. We will not save that, because that was just bonsai tree nastiness. We will import the file that I know is correct, which is going to be that one. And let's take all the defaults out of Max. So this is pretty much the same thing coming out of InfraWorks.

Now downstrea-- so, I didn't pick the textures that InfraWorks has. I picked just a random color off their color wheel. Do y'all all notice that? When I push this downstream to a game engine, it's going to call everything Material 1, Material 1, Material 1 Parentheses 1, parentheses 1.1. It's going to give it a horrible, terrible names that are going to make my life incredibly complicated when I get it into a game engine.

So what I'm going to do-- those that know Max-- I'm going to do this if I can find it, M. I like the Slate Material Editor probably because I haven't been in Max very long. I am a novice amateur in Max. I get in, and do what I need to, and I get out. I don't do any real creation there. Hopefully that'll change in next few years.

Pick that first material. Simply go over and just change it to the name it is, asphalt, done. And I'll do that six times. So I'll do it two more for y'all. I'll pick the grass, double-click on that material, change its name to grass, done. OK. And I'm going to do the ribbon curb the third time. Maybe I'll just do the wall. Pick the wall, and my slate's just getting ugly as hell. But it doesn't matter as long as I've got the names. And we'll call that Wall, right?

So what does InfraWorks do strangely with fbx files? I mean, it doesn't hold state plane coordinates in your x and y. But it has a tendency for us to hold the z, right. So, everything's up. And in this site, it's up in 600 feet. It's not-- the pivot point, or the model itself, are real far apart from each other, which is pretty normal. You just have to clean it up.

And the way that I do it-- so once I get all the materials' names, the way that I move that model and move it to a place that's a little bit more normal, is I'll just take that rectangular box and pick everything. I will unlink it, and I do it twice. It's like purging. I kind of feel like I have to do it twice even though you probably don't really need to. And then I'll move it.

So I'm on the move command. I'm sorry, I skipped a step. I'm going to group it. I'm going to call it Site. We're going to put everything in one container. I'm just going to tie it all together, and then I'm going to move it. And right now, you can tell it's at about 200, 276, and 646, which is the actual elevation.

The x and y is wrong, because it's trying to water it down, get it better to be a little bit higher fidelity in Max. But I just change all those to 0, 0, 0, just to get it more normally back into a spatial realm of reality. Then I'll export it, and I'll say File, Export. And I'm going to call it-- man, I put things in the wrong folder all the time.

I'll say, this PC, D: drive, Run08-- and I'm going to call this, Site, maybe, move, just so we know it's moved. And the materials have been corrected. I didn't do them all in this one. But we would have renamed all the materials to grass, walls, asphalt, ribbon, curb, etc. So we moved it. We'll say, OK. Save it as an fbx file, pick all the defaults, and get the crap out of Max, right, because I'm not good there.

So we've done all that. Now we go back into Revit. You know what, we'll skip Revit. Revit will come.

So, where am I going now-- game engines. There are few out there that are free-- Unity, Unreal. I don't know about Cry. I haven't really kept up with it. I don't know if they've realized that they have to compete. They're going to have to go free eventually.

There's a new one on the market, new boy in town. You probably heard of it. It's called Stingray. That's Autodesk's. They bought one and branded it. And I think they've got an interesting marketing angle, because it plays really nice with Max and Maya. And I don't think-- I think you subscribe to it. I'm not sure how their licensing works. So I'm kind of curious to see if it catches on. We'll get there.

That's not where I'm going to go. Where I've gone-- and we beat our head against it-- is I'm using a product, that is a proprietary product and they are on the floor at AU and I talked to them yesterday-- called Lumion. Show of hands, anybody's used it? Great.

InfraWorks and Lumion are our best friends, which is interesting because Lumion isn't marketed that way. It's marketed for architects. But it works really well with stuff coming out of InfraWorks, I mean, like obscenely well. And I don't think everybody's noticed that yet. Maybe after this class, you'll be my disciples, and spread the good word, and the word will spread, and we'll all know soon. But it is a very powerful program for rendering with a very shallow learning curve. So it's worth looking into.

And we're going to get in it, and I'm going to show you how I do my workflow. Oh, that's not-- that's Stingray. We'll get into Lumion. And this one I'm nervous that I'm going to have a licensing issue. Make sure-- I'm going to plug-in their network cable, because it's probably going to gripe at me. I just saw that. If not, I'll tether it into my phone. It's a cloud license. We buy one for the company. OK, good. We're in.

And I'm going to go through this really fast. Again, I speak really fast. I show things really fast. Sorry. I'm going to import-- yeah, OK. I'm going to import a file. And I can import that fbx file that we created out of InfraWorks, that we used our site design, and aggregate, and put all our coverages on, and put our trees in, and I'm going to import that in. So that's D, and I'm going to cheat and do one that I know I fixed right. And we're going to call this, Eight. And we're going to-- Import Animations, there aren't any, doesn't matter, going to bring it in. It's going to load. It's going to think. It's going to churn.

OK, there's that site. There's a big arrow saying, put the thing here, which is really helpful. And there is our site. So I'm going to move it up just to make sure it doesn't include it in the ground. But notice the aerials are transferred over, models transferred over. And this is really easy. This is why I love Lumion.