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Port Planning with InfraWorks

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설명

This class will explore a large-scale port/transportation project utilizing features in InfraWorks software along with AutoCAD Civil 3D software, AutoCAD software, and AutoCAD Map 3D software. Discover some key techniques to help guide you in transitioning from 2D conceptual planning to 3D and even 4D sequences. This course will cover a wide range of InfraWorks functions, such as creating custom "city furniture" from various sources; creating bridges, roads, and rail; randomizing data objects; running scripts; and, finally, creating project fly-throughs and renderings.

주요 학습

  • Discover benefits of conceptual planning large-scoped projects by identifying conflicts earlier
  • Learn the InfraWorks process (from 2D to 3D)
  • Learn how to get to the "what if" solution quicker
  • Get tips and tricks

발표자

  • Brian Allen
    Brian Allen is a CAD Manager for Moffatt & Nichol based out of Savannah, Georgia. With approximately 19 years in the AEC industry he has gained experience in many areas of design including GDOT transportation projects, Residential & Site Development, Water/Wastewater, Storm Drainage and Marine/Port Development. During the later part of the 19 years he had the opportunity to work as a Solutions Consultant for a large national Autodesk Reseller. During that4 year stint he was recognized as a Top 5 ATC instructor for the year. His software strengths are: AutoCAD/Civil 3D/InfraWorks/Map3D... and many more in the Autodesk portfolio of products.
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      Transcript

      BRIAN ALLEN: So welcome to Port Planning with InfraWorks. My name is Brian Allen. I'm a CAD Manager out of the Savannah office-- Savannah, Georgia-- for Moffatt & Nichol. This is really just a talk about, really, on everything that you can do with InfraWorks and port planning.

      It's just talking of the different thing that you can do. It's not really built-- InfraWorks isn't really built to do port design or planning. It's just another tool that you can use to get the idea across. And I will just talk about a few of the things that I've discovered in the process of trying to get a 3D model to show the stakeholders to what we're actually planning and what we're trying to do.

      So before we do any of that, I think I need to introduce you guys to ports. Anybody here not done anything with ports before? So everyone here has done something with ports? No? All right, I didn't think that would be the case, but OK.

      Because I know, four years ago, before I got into this space, I knew nothing about ports-- nothing. I'm still learning every day. So there's lots of jargon and terminology within that industry, lots acronyms. So I'm going to throw a few at you, but I'm going to tell you what they are before we get too deep into it.

      But first off, a little bit about the ports-- who are they? So if you think about the owners or the operators, who they are-- a lot of them are private entities. They could be local, state depending on where they are, in the US or outside the US. And then the stakeholders-- who are the decision-makers? Who pulls the strings and says what gets done?

      It's usually run by a board of governors, especially the ones that I deal with, that are from various backgrounds that are on the board making these decisions-- executive-type decisions. And their challenges, really, are to maintain efficient flow of transportation and logistics. That's really what it's about-- is to get goods spread throughout imports, exports. And that's really what it is.

      So if we think about that, the real driving force behind globalization in the economy is the declining cost of transport. So as these ships get bigger and bigger, it's cheaper to send goods across the seas. So now onto the jargon and some of the equipment that I had to learn about before I can start designing spaces for these things, because these are massive pieces of machines. And then where do you put these big items?

      So the first one is a TEU. Everybody's seen these on the highways in the back of trucks, right? So a TEU is referred to-- or you can think of that as a 20-foot equivalent unit. Just means a 20-foot box, and the standard box is 8 foot high by 8 foot wide and 20 foot long.

      And then there is also a High Cube. So you may see High Cube in your stamp on the back of a container if you see it on the truck. That just means it's 9 and 1/2 foot tall. It's still considered as a TEU. You just may see it stamped with High Cube.

      And then there's a 2TEU. Just means double the length of a regular 20-foot box. So here's just a little image, just to show you what a 2TEU is compared to a standard TEU, and how they're stacked on a ship. And then how these containers are transferred from ship to shore is an STS crane.

      It's a massive piece of machinery. Millions of dollars for just one of those cranes. And they are specified specifically for the port in their handling operations. It could be automated or it could be remote, or the guy could be on top of the crane looking down and picking up the boxes and moving them onto the trucks.

      And then next is an RMG. It's a Rail Mounted Gantry crane. And these are fixed on a rail. They have wide spans, or gauges, and they can be used throughout a port or a container yard, and maybe even through an intermodal yard. An intermodal is just transferring the goods or the boxes from one site to another. Think of from rail to truck, or from rail to truck to crane to ship. These cranes are the ones that stack those into container stacks.

      And another type of crane that you can use is RTG. It's a Rubber Tire Gantry crane. And these are really flexible for a port, because you can take these and move them wherever the work needs to be done.

      So if you think about a container yard that gets full, now they're going to need to go to another container yard to stack and work that, then you can move that throughout. The only difference, really, is that the capacity is much lower for an RTG than it is an RMG, because it's on tires instead of rail.

      Then the next thing that's common within the industry is an eRTG. Same thing as an RTG, except it's powered by electricity instead of diesel or gas that a standard RTG may be powered by. In the next slide-- I know we're in Las Vegas, where reefer is legal, but this is a reefer container, and it's not what you think.

      So it's just a refrigerated container, all right? You see the trucks on the road, and there's big refrigerators in the back of it, just keeping chickens cool, going across the road. It's really all it is.

      And then there are other structures on a port called Reefer Racks, and you can see that right here. It's just a structure that has electrical outlets applied that they plug into the reefer containers to keep them powered until they're being shipped. So they come off of the ship. They'll go into a reefer stack, and they'll plug into a reefer rack. And those are all the things that we have to plan for. So it's everything for electrical routing, running conduit to get those powered.

      And I mentioned this earlier-- just an intermodal yard. So you can see the transfer between the RMG from rail to truck. You can see a truck right there in the middle. So it'll pick it up off of the rail, put it on the truck, then the truck will go where it needs to go.

      And the next part is the exciting part of the ports-- is the ships. Especially if you get to see these up close in person-- really, really big. So consider this. Since I'm from the Savannah office, I do a lot of stuff out of the Savannah area. But if we see the growth and we think about why the growth and why it is that I do what I do and stay busy almost all the time, Savannah's containerized trade increased by 9.7%-- almost 10%-- in the first quarter of this year. That's pretty substantial.

      So if you think about that and think about why the growth has been that substantial, anybody think of a possible reason?

      AUDIENCE: Hurricanes.

      BRIAN ALLEN: Well, you would think, if it was hurricanes, that the growth would go down, right? It increased. What was that?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Exactly. That's exactly right. So if you think about what happened, what impact that huge construction project did for our area is the shipping line has just become much more efficient. It's a much straighter line than having to go around the continents to get to the east coast.

      So in 2006, in June-- sorry, not 2006, 2016-- Panama Canal opened the new locks-- widened locks. So with that, the vessels that are calling on the east coast, and especially Savannah-- that actually grew 20% for the vessel size. Still get a lot of vessels, but the vessels are getting bigger.

      So with bigger vessels, we're getting more boxes. Then what do we do with more boxes? We have to plan for space. We have to clear land. We have to handle those somehow, get equipment to be able to run and handle those boxes.

      So it's a little bit different then just trying to figure out where a car's going to go. You've got these massive machines, heavy duty pavement that you've got to take care of. So it's planning for all these heavy machinery.

      So a little bit about the Panama Canal. If you look at the size of it and what it has done-- I've got a couple of stats, here. So pre-2016, the length of a ship is about 970 feet-- 965. And then after the new lot, it grew to-- a navigable ship-- to now 1,200 foot long. That's a pretty large ship.

      The width increased from 106 to 161 for the ship size that can go through the canal now. And the TEU-- that's a huge number. That's a huge number-- from 5,000 TEU to almost 13,000-- and that's just a number. Really, depending on the ship, you can possibly get a 14,000, maybe 14,500 TEU going through there depending on the draft of the ship. These are just estimated numbers.

      Little graphic representation of the lock. So you can see how much smaller it was up until June, and then the new locks shows how much of a bigger ship that you can navigate through there. It's a much bigger ship, many more containers.

      Talk a little bit about ship evolution, here. Normally, the average size ship that we get in Savannah are probably around this size right here, about 9,500. That's probably considered a mid-sized ship-- which is still quite a large ship.

      And trying to figure out-- if you're not used to containers in shipping, if you don't think about the impact that has on an economy, think about what it can actually have in those containers. So let's just take into consideration a 10,000 TEU vessel. That's equivalent of 5,000 40-foot containers. That's probably the average container that you get on a ship.

      You don't get many 20-foot containers. You'll get a few, but majority are the larger ones. So 5,000 40-foot containers, and everybody wears shoes-- well, most of us do in the US, anyway.

      So think about 12,000 pairs of Nikes that fit into one box. That's a lot of shoes. That's almost 60 million pairs of shoes per vessel. That's a lot of shoes. At $75 a pair, $4.5 billion of goods on one ship. Just think about it. That's $4.5 billion in shoes.

      Chances are it's not just one ship just full of shoes. I'm just using this as an example. Transportation cost is, really, $0.26 a pair. That's not a lot. That's cheap.

      So if you think about the midsize ship of a 10,000 TEU vessel, compare that to a 14,000 TEU vessel, you can see that the amount of goods shipped is quite substantial. If we go through that-- 14,000 TEU, 7,000 container boxes. Again, 12,000 pairs per box, and that's now grown to 84 million pairs of Nikes. That's a lot of shoes.

      That grows to $6.3 billion. And this, again, is just an idea, just to get a context of how much money can be involved into shipping all these containers. Transportation costs for that size vessel is probably a little bit less than that, because you can get more boxes on there, so economies of scale come into play. But just kept that constant, just to give an idea.

      And then this year, there was LaVar. Anybody follow basketball at all? Nobody saw his prices of shoes that he was trying to get for his sons? Nobody? This is actually quite funny, if you paid attention to sports, because he was selling issues for $495 a pair. So I just threw this in here, just to see how ridiculous this is.

      So the same thing if you were looking back at the other values. And then you throw LaVar's shoes in there-- that's quite a bit-- $29.7 billion. I don't think his shoes are worth $495, but OK. So again, the 14,000 TEU.

      All right, so just to get some imagery, here, about how big these ships are. So this is what I'd call the average ship that calls on Savannah-- or the average size. And the next few are the ones that are just starting calling in the Savannah area.

      So this is the COSCO development. This is a huge thing that happened for us-- a 13,000 TEU ship. You can see how big that ship is compared to the buildings just off the riverfront. It's massive. I mean, the ship itself is a city.

      That's huge. It's massive. And then that was the first ship. That was in May of this year. That was the biggest ship to ever call in the port of Savannah. That was in May. And then just two months ago, a bigger ship came through called the CMA CGM Roosevelt. It's almost 14,500 TEU. So again, same location, pretty much, as the other one, just from a different orientation the picture was taken. It's a pretty big ship, lots of boxes.

      So I show these because you have to take all of this into consideration when you're talking about planning for ports. When I say ports, I use that term loosely, because it can really mean anything dealing with the port. Not just the port itself off of the river or off of the berth. Can mean anything.

      If you think about from the rail, out to-- let's talk about a regional port. Maybe they just do something out in the mountains somewhere with another container yard. That's still port-related, so I still call that port planning. So you have to take all of this stuff into consideration.

      So the tools that I use to go through and use for planning are some of the most obvious ones, I think-- Civil 3D, or AutoCAD. And I know this is the Autodesk convention, but SketchUp is up there, so don't shoot me. And I'll talk about why in a minute.

      So AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and there's a couple in here that I didn't put, just because I don't use them a lot. But I've used Plant 3D. I had a use for that on a site. And then, obviously, there's InfraWorks, because that's what we're here for. And then 3DS Max Design.

      Those are, I'm going to say, the top four that I use to model a particular site. And then at the end of my modeling adventure, I will take those out into After Effects or Camtasia to do some final video production. Any questions before we get into tips and tricks and talking about software and stuff? Anything about ports? Any questions before we get into that? Is that the good stuff, what you're here for?

      AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Plant 3D-- if you think about the uses for AutoCAD by itself-- we'll just use AutoCAD for if you think about your 2D layout and your geometric geometry, because a lot of stuff, by the time I get it, there's already been a planning group that is super confidential, to where it's already been planned for, maybe, two or three months, and then I get it. That happens a lot.

      If you look on the server, there's code names for something that you have no idea what it is. And then finally, when you get access to it, it's like, oh, this is all that somebody else did, and the line work doesn't meet into end, and now you've got to connect everything to get it to work. Nobody's ever had files like that, right?

      Other uses for AutoCAD will be the actual creating the equipment. So if you think about those cranes, if you need those modeled, when I got into my position, we had a few other pieces modeled, but not a lot. And especially some of the ports I was involved with were quite massive, so they had to be unique equipment.

      So they had to be designed based off of some other cranes, if you think about things like that, but still had to be done. And used AutoCAD to do it. I'm not an inventor guy. Probably could have been done much, much quicker on Inventor, or maybe even 3DS Max. But a couple of them, I used AutoCAD, and it was fine.

      And then Civil 3d-- why you might want to use that is there is the interoperability to use Civil 3D with InfraWorks. If you think about grading the site, if you got a lot of hills and want to flatten it down a little bit, you can grade a site, put it over. Corridors-- pull that into InfraWorks-- seamless. We've all used AutoCAD to create the exhibits like that-- pretty picture kind of thing.

      And then 3DS Max Design-- so 3DS Max-- I've gotten some models from some of the vendors, or the manufacturers. So if you know what the operator is going to want from whatever manufacturer, you can request to get those if you have a contact. Some will just tell you heck no. You can't have that. But someone really nice, if you ask really nice, they may give you a model if you sign some kind of agreement that says you'll never give it away.

      So with that, may be used to modify a particular piece of equipment just so it fits on your site. Maybe the gauge is a little bit wrong, so I use 3DS Max to change to gauge-- or the colors, because the owners want their particular color scheme on their cranes. To me, it's just a crane, but to some people, colors matter. So change things like that.

      And then there's SketchUp. And the reason I put SketchUp up there is they have a vast catalog of items out there that you can search for. I will tell you, if you try to go use anything from SketchUp, you really need to check the model to make sure the integrity is there, because there's times that I've imported a particular model from SketchUp, and the materials didn't quite work. So you have to play around with that a little bit.

      Also, the size is off. So if you think about how SketchUp works and apply material to it, you're just moving it, or they just draw a box and says, this is a container. It's not really the same size. So if you're talking about modeling a port in real world size, you want to make sure that your equipment's the right size.

      And then there's InfraWorks. So that's the end goal-- is to get everything that we just talked about into InfraWorks, get it to where it's nice-looking, portrays the idea of what we're trying to do. And I put consumes other CAD files.

      It does that, but you can also model on the fly. But I consumes, really, because what I do and the way that I need it, I need it to be a little bit more accurate and to-the-point detail-- I need this to go here. When you do things on the fly in InfraWorks, depending on what it is, it's quite difficult to lay certain things out. Just think about parking lots. Anybody's ever tried to do a parking lot in InfraWorks, it's not fun-- at all.

      So consumes other files-- AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Revit, shapefiles, 3D models, SketchUp, dae, fbx. And then just go through a few snapshots. After we go through this, we'll go through some tips and tricks that I've learned.

      By the way, if you're sitting in here, you agree to the confidentiality agreement that you cannot talk about any of these ports that you see. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to tell you where they are. You can guess.

      All right, so all of these are just taken from the InfraWorks software-- from the snapshot tool. These are technically not renders, but they look somewhat that way. But one of the complaints I get from some of the port personnel is they say that it looks like an engineer did it. Duh, right?

      So just so you know, you can export a model out, and you could take it into 3DS Max Design. And if you want to spend weeks at doing that, you can do that-- like a really long time. Or you can just do this in a couple minutes. So you model it, snapshot, it's done-- depending on the quality and the resolution you give it. Could be seconds, or it could be minutes. We'll go over that, too.

      So now you can see why I talk about all these different things, because I didn't know how massive these pieces of equipment were. I didn't know how to plan for that. Me coming into a regular job, and in my background. I'm used to road widths-- 12-foot wide, 2% slope.

      I have no idea about ports when I went into it, so I had to do a lot of research, figure out what RTG can run on. What slope does a rail need to be if you have rail access? Those are all things that you need to know to lay things out.

      We can see, here, there's some reefer racks that had to be modeled. That's one of the things that I said that I did in Plant 3D. I remember playing with 3D years ago, and it had a platform-- or a tool to make a platform. Basically, it's the mesh flooring with stairs. So I used that, and it only took seconds to actually model that, compared to having to go find one or any other ways to getting that.

      And some of these took quite a bit of time to do, others not so much. It's funny, because the first one took a long time, but after you do the first one, then you get a database of objects, and you can just use the objects over and over and over again. So I like to show this image here, is because the next one is a tool that I found, actually, by mistake. And I'll show you that tool here in a few minutes when I actually get into InfraWorks.

      So one of the things that I was requested about is like, hey, this model looks great. But I really need to see the heavy duty pavement. Can you show me that real quick? I have no idea. But there's a way.

      You can have the same image, but turn that selection process on in the software. So go back and see that back and forth. Stands out to show the operating area, or heavy duty equipment-type pavement. And then sometimes you're asked to model the existing, and that's one of the worst things that I ever want to hear, is model the existing. Just want to do new stuff, because you can just make stuff up. But when you have to do existing, it gets quite difficult.

      So the one on the left-- that's an existing container yard, and I had to do the existing model to show what we were planning for future phases. So that took a little bit of time to actually go-- whoops, wrong button. Not quite the same orientation, but it's the same area on the yard.

      That's the same yard, different angle. And that's all from AutoCAD, Civil 3D, SketchUp, 3DS Max, InfraWorks. So these are the new objects, here.

      This is called an RPM, or Radiation Portal Monitoring. So if you think about the way a truck, and they want to check it for customs and make sure there's no bombs on it, goes through a monitoring station-- this is one of them. So I actually did that from details. None of that was ever modeled before-- at least that I know of. So I had to do that from scratch.

      And the last thing I was talking about before the video production is After Effects. So After Effects may be used for just video motion graphics. If you think about moving text, or if I've got video playing and I want to have a line that shows where that goes to go along with that-- so that's After Effects.

      And then Camtasia, lastly, for the final output-- only because I know it. I know that After Effects can do that, I'm just not that big on After Effects, because it takes a long time to look at all those buttons. Don't have that much time, so I use what I know.

      So a couple tips and tricks-- if you're using AutoCAD and you know that it's going to go into InfraWorks, use a coordinate system. I hear somebody laughing. Yeah? How many files do you get when no coordinate system is applied? Lots, right?

      It saves you time if you apply the coordinate system in your drawings, because when you use the command mapexport, it will see that the coordinate system is applied, and then when you import it into InfraWorks, it will behave nice and happy. Right here. Mapexport. And these are just the different dialog boxes-- so these two right here for map, if you're inside the map tools defining coordinate system-- and this is the one for Civil 3D if you're using Civil 3D to [? plan the ?] coordinate system.

      I'll tell you that to get the AutoCAD files out for a model, fbx works great. And then when I say be mindful of units, scaling, and the orientation, you got to know that InfraWorks is completely based off the metric system. Everything is.

      Even though it converts and it uses a global coordinate system to convert what you import into it, sometimes-- especially if you're using objects from somebody else that you have no idea what it is-- it's a idea to just open that model up and figure out what it is. Otherwise, you have to import it, scale it, rotate it to get that net to work.

      And what I mean by orientation-- you will have a much better go of getting your model to work nicely is if you know the orientation of your site compared to the orientation of your models. So what I mean by that, if you think about-- and I'll show this here, in a minute, too, but let's just talk about it for a minute. Is if you've got a car, and if you think about the Cartesian plane, x and y-- and the front of the car is rotated north, [? or ?] [? y. ?] Front of the car, back of the car.

      And then if your site is rotated, or your plan is 45 degrees, and you don't have a parking lot, chances are it's going to be some 45 degrees, or some variation of 90 degrees from that. So if all your models are at true north of your site set 45, if you can make one model that's at 45 when you start importing the objects, they're already at the rotation they need to be. So that's what I mean about the orientation for that, because you'll see some of the automation, the parts of placing-- and I don't know why they call this furniture in InfraWorks-- you'll find that you'll have a better go of it.

      And then my little tip for SketchUp to InfraWorks is export to a dae, or a COLLADA file. And then when you export-- anybody ever export a COLLADA file from SketchUp or any other application? So you'll know that it will create the file itself under the folder that you tell it, but also create another folder of the file name separately, with all the materials in it. Move the COLLADA file into the material folder. InfraWorks will find it and be happy always. If you don't, it won't find the materials.

      And then, I found it works best for me-- especially the objects that I've worked on-- is to export Max files to COLLADA. Even though sometimes FBX will work. Sometimes I've crashed with one or the other. If one of them doesn't work, I just use the other. It uses both. I wish I knew the answer to that, but I don't.

      My other suggestion here is to set a standard folder structure for InfraWorks. The reason I say that is-- well, to set some kind of standard so it's easy so you know how to go in and find the information you're looking for. So just like you have a standard folder structure for your construction projects, have one set up for your InfraWorks.

      Create a specific folder for renders. Create one for 3D models that you use, because every project is going to have a different set of models. Especially if they need to be saved to the network, you can define exactly which ones were used for a particular project.

      And then I wrote this, and after I wrote it-- I don't know that I've seen this issue in the last year since there's been the render tool in InfraWorks. Anybody notice that? You know what I'm talking about, for you that has used InfraWorks and rendering?

      So the issue that I found is-- let's see if I can go back, here, to one of these models. I'll show you where it happened. Oh, there it is. So right there-- that row of well cars with containers-- there are actually supposed to be containers on it.

      So this is an older image from a couple years ago. I don't remember which version of InfraWorks. But I found this issue to where I had this model, and if I copied the style from location to location to location, and when I got to a certain number-- let's just call it x, because I don't remember-- it looked fine in the model, but as soon as you hit Render, only half the materials would show up. So I don't know if it still does that, now, with Snapshot, but I thought about that after I wrote it, so I kept it in there.

      And then model sourcing-- so some of the best sites that I found to get some models from. TurboSquid's probably the number one. Those are paid for models. They're usually the best ones that you can get, especially from what I found.

      If you know of other sites, I'd love to hear them, but that's a really good one. 3D CAD Browser is a great one, GrabCAD, and obviously the warehouse that I talked about earlier. So questions on that part? I'm about to get into the InfraWorks. No? No questions? Enough of slideshows?

      I'll try to do this with this much space on this podium. All right. So this is container yard, rail yard, stacks. Oh, it's not there. Sorry. There we go.

      So this is when I was talking about modeling the existing. I think I took that one from about here-- an image. Something like that, maybe. I don't quite remember.

      So let's have you guys pick up. Any issues that you guys have had with imports and modeling something like this? None? Yep.

      AUDIENCE: Yeah, the striping.

      BRIAN ALLEN: The striping. OK, so issues with striping-- how do you do that? Painstakingly.

      [LAUGHTER]

      I'm not kidding. So all right, so what this really is-- if you want to look the striping, that is a closed 2D AutoCAD polyline-- each one of them separately. There's other ways you can do it that I've seen, other tips and tricks on the net about doing this. I don't recommend doing it, because when you do that, it doesn't look nice and neat, and it doesn't look like striping when you do it.

      And so again, that stop bar, or parking bar there-- that's a closed 2D polyline at the width that it needs to be. So when you import it, it's just got the fill pattern into it. It's basically an import as a coverage area, OK? And I think everybody's probably done that, and that's how they figured out how to do it. There's a couple scripts that I have, or [INAUDIBLE] that will take a line. Yes-- question.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Something that's not flat. Well, it will drape. If you use the coverage area, and when you import it in to tell it to drape onto a surface, it will drape onto it.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: I'm sorry?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Well, when you import it into InfraWorks, you import it as a coverage area, it's no longer a polyline. And when you do a line, if it's just lines that you bring in, you can give it a buffer. But what that does-- if you think about a line and you can tell it's a buffer of four inches, it actually creates a round end cap, and it doesn't look like striping then. But there's no definition, no nice, neat corners like this when you do that.

      And I will tell you that each one of these sections here, they're just different polylines that were exported into a shapefile, or an SDF, and then brought in as coverage areas. All the striping-- even this piece of heavy duty-looking pavement-- still coverage area, but the order matters. Think about order of operation-- layering things on top of it. So one massive piece of pavement coverage, pavement type-looking material, and then overlay other pieces on top of it.

      So the other great thing about InfraWorks, here, is when you need to do things like show existing and then show something like proposed. You can go-- let's see. Let's try this one. Might take it a second to go through and flip.

      I apologize for the wait time for some of these. It's just the way InfraWorks works-- InfraWorks works. Can't say that any differently. There we go. So that's coming in.

      All right, so the existing option, while the other parts over here build-- the rail actually stopped about right here. So I didn't want to curve it around and take it to another part of the port to get other rail access. That's really all this is for, and I wish this would be a little bit faster, because there's a really cool bridge about right here.

      The perils of live presentation in InfraWorks. There we go. So anybody ever use the bridge builder in Civil 3D? Did you know it could do it? Yeah? That's what that was made from. I was actually surprised that it did it. So another great tool to use for the product, there.

      So what I was talking about before is making sure your models and their orientation-- I'm trying to get to a good spot, here. So let's say I want to put a string of cars along this road. So you could go about the long, drawn-out way-- go to city furniture, find the car, and pick the line first, and then drag, and then double-click. We'll put a string of cars, but notice the orientation.

      We don't drive along the road that way, right? So if you would think about it and say, oh, I need more or less cars, you can drag this and increase the quantity of furniture that you have, there. But if you click out of it and pick on one of them, you would think, oh, I can just rotate this to whatever I need to rotate it on, but it only does the one, not all of them. You would think, oh, well, I can just click this, click it again to select all of them. Oh, but then the rotation options are gone. You don't really get that part of it.

      And also, about this string of furniture, you can move this off of and say, oh, I'm just going to do a string, then I'm going to move it. Try not to do that. You will hate it if you do, because you will find out, if you do this and you select it twice to select all of them, say, oh, I just want a little bit less. Now it moves back. So just be aware of little things like that. It'll drive you crazy.

      So again, if you go through and you look at the orientation of these models and make sure that the rotation of what you need-- I'll go in and I'll define a car. I'll call it-- whatever this was. I think this was the Alfa. I'll call it Alfa-45. To tell me that that car, its orientation is rotated 45 degrees, because that way if I have some kind of line that's about 45 degrees from my site, I can drag that on my line, and it's already rotated the way that it needs to be. It's a whole lot quicker.

      And I'll do that for almost every possible car or vehicle or truck or equipment that needs to be that rotation. And the reason for that is when you get into something like-- well, what if you want to do randomization on that? You don't want a just string of one car over and over and over again. That doesn't quite look realistic.

      So then you have style rules. Anybody use a style rule before? First time hearing of it? First time here, style rule? Yeah? OK. So what that is is-- well, you can make a rule for styles. And I'll just show you how simple this is.

      If you go and add a new rule-- I'll just call it Car String. And you just double-click it, and then you edit the expression I'm just going to use the expression Car String, or name equals Car String. It can be as simple as that.

      And next is the styles. Think about all the different options that you might want to see along that road-- different cars, different vehicles, whatever it may be. If you add that and go back and say, OK, I want to use-- let's see. I've already got one that's rotated. I called it AU Alfa.

      So there's a probability matrix here, too, with it. I'm going to go back. I wish this would remember the last one that you went into. If anybody's in here from Autodesk, write that down.

      Let's put a white BMW. Let's put another couple cars in there, just to express what we're talking about. Let's put a Porsche Cayenne that my wife wants, but will never get.

      All right. So now you have to think about the probability. So if you want one vehicle to show up more than another, or another model to show up more than another, just give it a higher probability of the other ones. So if I wanted-- well, there's not many people that have Cayennes, so the probability of that's like, let's say, 0.2, and say 0.5. And then maybe that's, I don't know, 0.2 or something like that.

      So that's the style rule called Car String. And remember, the name has to be Car String. That's important. So if you go back and you click on this, notice that that one car does not have a name. Doesn't have a name.

      If you want the entire string to be randomized, you have to click it twice to get that whole string, there. So then name here needs to be Car String. And then before it works, you will have to remove the manual style-- because still, the manual will override any rule style. You have to actually go tell it to be none. So now they look like little boxes. Zoom in here and you can see that. Just InfraWorks icons.

      So how you get it to update is they're all still named Car String, and they're both zeroed out for the style. Hit Commit, and then run the rules. So you can see, it just did a randomization of the cars. So there was one BMW, there's a couple Alfas, and there's the one Cayenne.

      Now, when you go through and you increase the vehicles, it will switch to one style. It'll just pick one. And what you'll have to do-- since you did that, it will clear the name. So you have to go back, pick each one, clear out the style again, rename it Car String. Did I spell it-- yeah. And then rerun the rules so you get more cars.

      So that's randomizing anything in here based off of an expression, if you ever change the orientation of it-- especially anything that's in a string. Another thing that I've done-- let's see. I'll open up another site, here. I also, by the way, suggest, in every one of your models, put Easter eggs.

      [LAUGHTER]

      See if people pay attention. That's my son's favorite. So I'm like, all right, I'll put Bumblebee in there. It's kind of cool. I had Optimus, but I don't know what happened to him. All right, so let's open up another one, here. Got a couple minutes left.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: That does what, now?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Curve topology.

      AUDIENCE: Curb, curb.

      BRIAN ALLEN: Curb-- like curb and gutter? I have not found an easy way to do that yet that doesn't require you to use a corridor. Well, I guess another thing you could do is if you had the system of lines-- call it line, line, line-- you could insert one, drape it, insert the next one behind it-- think of the gutter-- drape that. Then go into the properties, and then drop it by value, because it would drop [? only ?] [? existing, ?] then you can drop it by a known z value and do it systematically that way, and that might work. It's not ideal, but might work.

      Fortunately for me, I don't have to do curb and gutter on ports, so it's a little different one, there. All right, so the reason I wanted to open this model here is individual parking lots, or randomization of things like that. So what I would do is I would place one. Just place one car, and I would copy it over and over and over and over and over again, wherever I needed to go.

      As long as I named it and copied it-- or hopefully I named it before I copied it, otherwise it'd just be for naught. And then do a style rule for that name. So I've got a style rule called just PAV-- Personal and Vehicles 1. So there's a rule of style for that.

      So any one that's in that-- and that could be that orientation here. It could be-- I don't know if I've got other ones. I think there's another parking lot somewhere. Yeah, so there.

      So this is the part where I was talking about the buffer. See that-- that rounded paint stripe? Those came in in lines, and I gave it a buffer. I don't really like the way that it looks, but that's what you get. Just another thing there.

      So all the trucks-- I called it semis, yard, parallel-- parallel to me. There's a certain rotation that the side is on. Parallel just means that they're orientated to that angle. And the reason for that is if I'm talking about ports, parallel is to the berth.

      So if I've got trucks on site, there's perpendicular and there's parallel. Well, I thought I had trucks going parallel somewhere. Yep, there's some right there.

      AUDIENCE: Got a question back here.

      BRIAN ALLEN: Yep.

      AUDIENCE: How much time [INAUDIBLE]?

      BRIAN ALLEN: How much time? I didn't hear the end of it.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the whole model?

      BRIAN ALLEN: The whole model? This model you're looking at right here, two weeks. Two weeks start to finish. So I don't know if that sounds like a good time for you, but I think it's pretty quick. Yeah, question? No?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] spots in the parking lot, do you go back there and delete the cars you don't want, or do you give a randomization through the [INAUDIBLE]?

      BRIAN ALLEN: You can do a string and do it that way. I tend to get away from that sometimes. Here, what I did is I just used the Control-C, and then copy. And that little box is the center of that object.

      Just click, Control-V, click, Control-V, click-- and it takes a little bit of time, but at least the advantages you get from doing that is-- well, by copying and pasting it over and over again, you've already got the name, and all you have to go do is just rerun the rules.

      The only thing about the rules here when you do that is the cars that are already there will not change their randomization. Only the new ones that are placed will change the randomization. The only way to change the randomization of the other cars-- you got to go change the value in the rule. So if you had one of them at 0.2, change it to 0.21, and then it will update the rest of them if you don't like the colors, or something like that-- or the vehicles or objects, or whatever that is.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Yeah, yeah. It's already rotated at the orientation that I want.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Oh, yeah. You want to make sure that, yeah, they're copied at that and they're at that-- and it will hold that orientation . If you copy and paste, it'll hold that orientation.

      Now, the other thing about the other-- when you run the rule, all of the vehicles or the models that you have need to have the same orientation. If you don't, you'll get what happened with the Cayenne and the BMW and Alfa. You will have one of them that's right, and the rest of them are all wrong.

      Any other questions? We got, what? Two minutes. Yes.

      AUDIENCE: What are some of the uses for scripts [INAUDIBLE]?

      BRIAN ALLEN: Uses for scripts-- all right, so before I got into just doing the one-- that's an entire stack, just one of them. I just copied the boxes around, and then made a model from that. There's no way to script the material for a box. The way I was trying to do it when I first started this is-- remember, years ago, there was a script that would randomize building heights and materials. And so I used that to start.

      But the issue trying to do it with container boxes is the side of it-- one material goes around the entire side. You can't specify side box or side right, side left, end one, end two. You can't do that in InfraWorks-- at least without some extensive coding, and I know enough to be dangerous, and I can't do that.

      So one of the scripts that I used was just that one. I just took the materials out, and I applied random colors. But even that-- what it would do is I could not get it to randomize the color and shift in phases-- like red box on the bottom, blue box in the middle, green on the top. I couldn't get it to do that-- which would have been amazing if it could. But again, if it's a building that you're telling the building to be a script and randomize height, one side is the entire height. There's no differentiation between the levels of that, and that's the issue.

      So that was one of them for that. Any other scripts that I've used, maybe. I have done some scripts with Google Maps, but that was back in my site development, residential days. To be able to look at a map like this, and if you're doing the fly-by, will bring up some point of interest. One minute. I've got one minute left. OK. Other questions? I saw another hand. No?

      AUDIENCE: What about the randomization on the train?

      BRIAN ALLEN: Randomization on the train.

      AUDIENCE: Yeah. How would you create all those cars on the train?

      BRIAN ALLEN: So all the cars on the train-- that's actually just one model that I just went in and did, and I just took the time to do that. I started doing the string of well cars that way, but the issue is when you get to a curve. Can't really do that on a curve. So I just went ahead, and I just made me a collection of well cars that had different boxes on it-- nothing special. Takes a little bit more time, but it works all the time.

      AUDIENCE: So when you said it took two weeks to create the whole model, you already had all these [INAUDIBLE]? The library created them for you?

      BRIAN ALLEN: Yes. Yeah, I already had the library done. The only thing that was probably a little different was the thing about the AutoCAD entities. That's getting a land plan from somebody that really didn't know AutoCAD and correcting that file to prep it to go in InfraWorks. And I'd just say closed entities, and make sure they're closed. Someone's giggling like he's experienced that before.

      AUDIENCE: Can you bring anything in from [? Eagle ?] tracking? Like the parking lot finder [INAUDIBLE]?

      BRIAN ALLEN: You'll have to explode it. You'll have to explode that, make it into dummy entities, and bring it in.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: Yeah, yeah.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      BRIAN ALLEN: I did the same thing. I did the vehicle tracking, just to test it and see what-- I was hoping it would come in, but I haven't tried it in the 2018 version, so I don't know. It might work. So unless you got anymore questions, that's all I got.

      [APPLAUSE]

      Appreciate it.

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