Using GIS Data for Your Civil 3D and InfraWorks Projects from Esri Data Sources

CHUCK PIETRA: OK. Let's get started. Just a couple minutes early, but that's OK. We're going to need the time. Make sure you're in the right place. Welcome to AU 2018. If it's your first time here, you're going to have a real great week. If you just take advantage of everything that's there, you'll be exhausted by Thursday, I promise you. And you will have learned a lot and had a lot of fun at the same time.

My name is Chuck Pietra. And a little bit about myself quickly. This is my seventh time teaching at AU, and people say, Chuck, are you still nervous when you do these things, and the answer is absolutely I am. No question about it. You never really get over it, you know? I live in Central New York in Syracuse, was born and raised there. We're about five hours west of Boston, about five hours from New York City, about five hours from Philly, and about five hours from Cleveland due east. So we're five hours in any direction you want to go to go to a bigger city.

So my background is physics. I was a physics teacher for a number of years, then got out of that and then the early '80s got involved with Autodesk and education. That was in the mid 80s; '80s. So Autodesk was only a few years old at the time. It had 50 employees in Sausalito, California. And you could call there with a tech question and talk to John Walker yourself. So things have certainly changed.

I started a training company in Central New York, and we became an authorized training center. Then I became a reseller, did that for 17 years. Was a reseller for Esri and Autodesk at the same time. I currently work for OBG, an engineering firm based in Syracuse. Just under-- there are seats right here. There's about five of them right there.

An engineering firm just under 1,000 people based in Syracuse, with about 25 offices, mostly east of the Mississippi. I manage the Technical Applications group there, and that's a group of about five people, who the BIM manager is in the group. The GIS manager is in the group. I have a Vault inventor support person, and I have a programmer. So that's about me.

This class is an hour long, and it'll be fast-paced. It will be recorded. It will be available for you, both video and audio, after AU. My handouts will go up onto the site probably around tomorrow. You'll see an enhanced version of the PowerPoint, and you'll see a handout that's a PDF file also with some background. Because some of the things I'm going to go through, we'll go through pretty quickly.

We're going to talk a lot about Civil 3D, Map3D, and Esri interoperability is really where we're going to be focused in on, both the old and the new. And if that's where your focus is and why you came to AU, you got some really interesting information coming your way if you just keep your eyes open, and I'll point you in the right direction as we get close to the end of this class.

So we probably won't have any time for questions during the presentation. Hopefully, I'll have some at the end. But if we don't, I'll give you some ideas of how you can get a hold of me very quickly. Right through your phone app, you can send me a question or a text. You can find me down in the Exhibit Hall, over where the infrastructure group is going to have their little answer bar. So I'll spend some time over there. We'll be talking about ArcGIS online and interoperability with Civil 3D and Map3D. We'll talk about InfraWorks.

InfraWorks has been in my life for now about five years and in the company I have really just only about six users that are using it regularly and have been trained. But I've been training it a lot outside of OBG. OK. So we'll talk about InfraWorks and how that plays into the mix.

And our data set for this demonstration comes from my hometown. We have a small lake in this town, Onondaga Lake, and for decades it was deemed the most polluted lake in America. It has made a dramatic turnaround in the past 20 years, after about a billion dollars and terabytes of data collected from Arc info back in the '90s, all the way through to InfraWorks data today. Most of it is in file base. Some of it is in BIM 360, and some of it is also in ArcGIS online.

But the history here goes back to post Civil War, to industrial waste 60 feet thick around this lake, with all kinds of issues with manufacturing facilities coming into town, all on the-- you're facing north here-- all on pretty much the west side of the lake. I grew up on the east side of the lake in a place Liverpool, New York. So I'm very intimate with this and have worked on this project for many years, helping this environmental infrastructure group work on it.

That's kind of like where our data set's going to come from. So this lake was deemed unswimmable before the Depression. That's how old we're talking about of years and years and years of abuse and not really doing much about it in a serious way. It has made an incredible turnaround.

So just raise your hand on this. How many of you are in a role right now where you are routinely dealing with CAD data and GIS data? And the whole room raises their hand, and that's good news, because if you were saying I was hoping to learn something about 3D Studio Max and get-- OK, you're in the wrong room. So this is a good group.

It's another question. How many of you as one of your specific goals at AU this year want to learn as much as you can about Autodesk Esri compatibility? And lots of hands go up. And that's real good, because there are sessions-- I believe there's one right after this one-- that just folds right into this one beautifully as far as the future. Because this is all real good news to us, because for years, we've been looking for the holy grail. We don't quite have it in our hands yet.

About a year ago this month, Autodesk and Esri announced a partnership with one another. And that was very, very exciting, because the GIS silo and the CAD silo and those folks don't talk to these folks and so forth. Those days look like they're coming to an end, because the two companies have come together. They're going to develop software together. And it looks like the two worlds are coming together after all this time.

But this did happen once before. In the mid '90s, the two companies came together and said we're going to bring the best of both worlds. We're going to have AutoCAD Release 13 and 14 that ran under DOS with PC ArcInfo under the hood. So you're going to be able to work in CAD, but at the same time, you're going to be able to create features from CAD Objects and have some type of a link between them and then type in ArcInfo commands right at your AutoCAD Command Line.

The product did really well. I trained a lot of people on it, sold a lot of it, supported it. It's the two companies that really didn't get along at the time. That's where things kind of fell apart. So the product went away, but it promised the best of both worlds. It really did. Of course, we didn't have BIM back then. Again, it was CAD and GIS only.

So we were talking about drafting and maps and simple AutoCAD Objects linked to ArcInfo features. But the idea was there, and the belief there. So the coming together of these two companies really make a huge difference now in our future. All of us that work in the trenches every day and have to work with products like Civil 3D and InfraWorks, but at the same time you have a tremendous amount of GIS data. Well now, hopefully, we're going to start bringing things together better than what we've had in the past so that things work a little bit more fluently for you.

So aren't marketing people just incredible? It's like you want to get on this thing and ride it like we're at 6 Flags or something. These are the BIM design wheel and the GIS wheel together. And you know, it kind of makes sense the way they have the two of them together. You can imagine scenarios with this, with the two of them together, BIM Project Delivery with BIM 360 in the cloud and then ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online on the asset operations and maintenance. And that kind of makes sense.

And then you can drag that out a little bit further also and maybe think of it in terms of products in the project lifecycle. If you think of it in terms of products, there's the products. On the GIS side, Esri has done a great job with creating APIs to develop applications within their products and applications around our GIS line. Autodesk is doing the same thing with Forge.

So a lot is happening there. But you can look at it in terms of products also. But those of us that work, I say in the trenches every day, you're working on projects, you're on the clock, data, you know that that wheel system is easier said than done. Because we're always dealing with a lot of legacy data, and that lake project, you're talking about dozens of projects that are in motion every day. It's over 14 Superfund sites around this lake. So it has been a mess for a long time.

There's a tremendous amount of data, projects springing up from projects, old workflows, new workflows, old products, old data sets need to use it. It can be a real mess, especially when everything is file based, which it mostly is. All the data for this project is located on servers. And you've got to go find things. And who's got who, what, when, where, how, how much, what version is always a problem.

So one of the things we're going to look at is workflow, workflow from old tools all the way to workflow of new tools. And at the very end, I got something very interesting for you where I go on a full-circle through a whole series of products in a workflow that will maybe send some light bulbs off.

We'll talk a little bit about importing into Civil 3D. And many of you have used the map import routine. There's a map import and a map export routine in Map 3D. And Civil 3D users use it all time. You can import MicroStation files. You can import Esri shapefiles.

And you're dealing with a dialog box that's very old. It looks something like this, where you can actually import a shapefile, decide what layer it should go on, decide has there been any classification on the objects you'd like to apply to the incoming features? What about your coordinate system? What about the feature attribute table on the shape file? You want to capture that? And if there are points, what block do you want to use?

So one of the things I'd like to do is just add a little bit of a twist to this, is when we bring in the features and make AutoCAD Objects out of them, simple AutoCAD Objects, I'd like to capture the feature attribute table, and I'd like to attach this to a SQL Server database. Because I have an old personal GO database that I've hacked up. I've got it up in SQL, and I want to use that and apply that and link it to these objects that I've actually brought in. I'd like to do that.

And then I'm also going to use an Object Query method. So here, I've brought the imagery in using Bing, using to the geolocation feature in Civil 3D, which is one of seven ways we can bring imagery in. And I'll show you all seven ways, because one of the things people always say is, Chuck, what's the best way to bring imagery in? I say, well, do you have files or do you have something online? What do you have?

Well, here, the workflow is going to be used map info-- I'm sorry. We're going to use Map Import to import a shapefile. And then that shapefile, when I import it, will of course, turn into AutoCAD Objects. They actually become AutoCAD Objects. Through object data, we will have the same-- we'll have the Feature Attribute table map through these objects as object data.

So as I import the objects, I'm greeted with this dialog box. You can do object classification in Map 3D. And of course, you can have matching or different coordinate systems. One of the things I'm going to do here is I'm going to say, yes, I want you to create object data. So get that feature attribute table and when you create that point or that line or that polygon, get those feature attributes and actually map them to the object as object data.

Because these are monitoring wells, I want to use my block for the monitoring wells. In my block, the mwells block, has an attribute on it, an AutoCAD attribute. And I'm going to populate that with one of those object data fields. So I'm accomplishing a lot of things at the same time here. I'm creating object data. I'm populating the Block Attribute table, and I'm going to actually link it to a database all at the same time. So I've just queried in those monitoring wells. They are blocks. Here they are. They're kind of in a temporary drawing here. I've got a coordinate system set up. I brought the imagery in.

Here is the imported block I've asked for. And if I were to edit the attribute on this block, I would see that the location ID has been populated. Where did that come from? It comes from the Feature Attribute table, the object data, and then to the attribute on the block. Why do I need the attribute on the block to be populated with that value? Because I'm going to use that to link it to the database.

So you can see the monitoring well now is not quite linked to the database yet, because I'm going to go right over to-- from my Map Task pane, I connected a SQL Server database. You can see the table right there. And what I will do is create a Link Template. That Link Template is the actual mechanism that will link that table to that monitoring well block through its block attribute.

So I've actually connected to that SQL Server database. And of course, with this viewing tool, I can sort, I can highlight records, edit records. So now I created the Link Template. And again, this is a temporary drawing. I've brought all the monitoring wells in. I didn't get to my last step, which I'll tell you. So now I have a link to this table. So these blocks are loaded with information now. They have their object data from the Feature Attribute table in the shapefile, and they also are linked to my database.

So these blocks are in a file that now I'd like to select certain monitoring well blocks to go into my destination drawing. Many times, Civil 3D users are faced with a problem. And that is, they're starting a project. They want to start with a clean template. They want to have all of their styles all ready to go. And then they want to capture geometry from these other drawings out there. They don't want all of it.

I don't want to get the thing and insert it and explode it, god forbid. I don't want to get the thing and xref it in. I don't want to do anything like that. All I want to do is selectively say from this drawing, I want this layer. From this drawing here, bring me the objects that meet the following criteria. In Map 3D, you have one of the most powerful misunderstood features. I can't overemphasize how valuable this can be to you.

The only thing you've got to remember is this only works with AutoCAD Objects. So it does not work with Civil 3D Objects. So what I will do here is in a different drawing-- now, I've saved that drawing, where I've actually imported the monitoring wells. I'm going to create a query. And I do this through Map 3D. When I create this query, I'll be able to query by location.

I'll be able to query by any intelligence that might be on that object, like object data or it's linked to the database, and query those objects from that drawing to this drawing. I can do this with a lot of drawings. Query drawings by drawings or all together. Query by layer. I can also change these objects. I can do a property change. I can rename blocks if I want to when they come in. And the thing is that multiple users could all be doing this at the same time.

So if you have drawings sitting out there on the server, and you've got six Civil 3D Map 3D users, they all could be attached to those drawings and querying in what they need. And it'll actually create AutoCAD Objects and temporarily it'll have a link back to the parent. And if you make an edit to that queried-in object, it's going to go bidirectionally right back and modify the object in the source drawing. So there's a lot of power here.

So now what I'm doing is I'm creating the query and spatially restricting where I want the monitoring wells to come from. I have an attached drawing. And right now I'm saying from that attached drawing, this is what I want you to give me. Only blocks. Only blocks with these names. Only blocks with these names that are on these layers. Only blocks with these names on these layers that have this attribute value wildcard.

So you can do a lot as far as picking and choosing what you want and not bringing too much geometry in. You don't want to do that. And your Civil 3D model is going to get big enough as it is. Why bring in all this unnecessary drawing information? So lots of people, when they start a Civil 3D project, they will immediately go and grab some old drawing projects and open them up and hit the ground running, having no idea what's in this drawing.

Here, you can start clean with a clean template, import, get the intelligence on the imported objects you need, actually execute the query, and get exactly what you want. So I'm creating a SQL condition here on that attached database and using a wildcard on that monitoring well's block attribute value. So it only brings in the spatially restricted area crossing window and within and blocks that match that.

So the story doesn't end here with this. Not only can you query these objects in, like I said, and you have a link back to the parent source, you can actually make modifications to these objects. You can edit them. You can change their layer. You can label. You can label with those object values that came in from the shape file. See, because object data tables are very inaccessible in AutoCAD. They're there to look at, but you really can't do much with them.

So when you import and Esri shapefile, you're going to get a lot of object data. Well, I want to label with that. How can I label with that? The query will let you label with any attached database or any object data. So it'll also let you theme so you can say when you bring these monitoring wells in, those with this name and this object data value, use this block name. Those with this, use this block name. So you can actually create thematics this way and create expressions. Very, very powerful. But it's been around forever.

So you can see that I queried in just the ones I wanted. They are linked to that SQL database. So as I click through the database, I zoom in on those objects, because they're linked to it. I can also click on the objects and highlight the record. So it works both ways. And label with any of those values that are in the table or label with any of those values that are in the object data table.

So this way, you're not swimming in a mess of data that you don't need right from the get-go. You're starting clean. Because there's geometry that you want and geometry that you don't want. Geometry that you want may be geometry that you're going to use for of Civil 3D Object. So you're going to bring in some type of a feature from a shapefile, make a polyline. I want that to be my pipeline in Civil 3D. That's my start. Or I want to use it as an alignment, a center line, and get my road started from that.

So that's one thing you'd want to use the geometry for, because there's so many things in Civil 3D that you can do from existing geometry. So this is existing geometry. It's coming from a shapefile. It's clean. You queried it in. It's an AutoCAD Object. No problem.

But another thing you can do with this geometry in Map 3D is create topology. You can create a topological data structure in your drawing out of the points, lines, arcs, and polygons. And this topology can be used for analysis. So you can do polys on polys, you can do points on polys, it'll create reports, it'll do intersections, unions, all with AutoCAD Objects. Where is the intelligence coming from? The object data. See, the object data is there in the properties, and you don't see it a lot of times, because you can't just simply label with it.

And If you go in Civil 3D and try to make a label style, you won't see the object properties as things you can label with. It's just there. It's old stuff, but you know, it's still very, very usable. And it's in that shapefile when it comes in. So you can do analysis here and create reports and so forth just out of AutoCAD Objects. And that's what I will do here.

I'll bring in a center line from a shapefile same way. Do the import, check my coordinate systems. If they are different, that's not a problem. Ask for the object data, even though in this case, I'm really not going to use it. And I bring in the geometry. And there it is. I've isolated it. That's coming from the Esri shapefile. This is perfectly valid to make an alignment with. And if I have an existing surface, and if I have an assembly, and I have a finish-grade profile, I'm ready to use this for a road. And that's exactly what we did here.

This was a road rehab that had to be done around a racetrack, because the New York State Fair is right on this site where this mess is. So you can see the racetrack off to the right. And there in white is my polygon. With every one of these examples, I will bring imagery in a different way-- a different way-- and I'll list them for you.

So the alignment gets created from this polyline. So of course, in Civil 3D, create alignment from objects. Create the alignment. And I just turned down some layers, and my corridor model is actually complete. And it just came from that existing geometry. And there it is. AutoCAD's Object Viewer is always a challenge for me, as you can see. But there is my corridor.

So another thing that I do in this demonstration that's along the same lines is I bring in the center line for Nine Mile Creek. That's a creek that goes from nine miles up in Marcellus, New York where you can fly fish, goes all the way down into Solvay, New York. Goes by about four waste beds. And by the time it goes by the four waste beds, and it empties in the lake, that water is a glowing lime green. And nine miles upstream on this thing, you're fly fishing. Well, things have changed. That water is pretty clean now. They've just done such a great job with this. There is Nine Mile Creek there.

What I do here is actually just create the topology. I create the topology, because I want to create some polygons and overlay polygons over points. So as you might imagine, over the 22 years of projects, this place has been poked so many times. There are so many wells boring that you can-- we have so much lab data.

So I create topology and do an overlay of polys on polys and points on polys to get a report of something that we just said, you know, the floodplain. How does it intersect those points, and what are the values of those points? And all I've got is AutoCAD Objects here. I'm not doing anything special here. These are just AutoCAD Objects, and I just create topology with Create Topology right there.

That overlay that I do creates more topology. And all of that is actually queriable, themeable, labelable. It's great. So make sure you take a good look at that. If you're using Map 3D or if you're using Civil 3D, you've got Map 3D under the hood, remember. Take a look at that Map Task pane right in the Map Explorer tab. That's where that is-- Create Topology. And my handout's got more information on that.

How do you bring imagery into your map? What's the best way to bring imagery in the map? Well, you've got the geolocation feature that's been around now for a couple of years. That's a little problematic. I don't know if you've had problems with that. I mean, it's restricted only to Bing Maps. But that geolocation feature in the 2017-'18 version, it would fail for us. Lots of problems with it.

Raster tools has been around forever. That was actually developed in Albany, New York. And it was called CAD Overlay. It's very, very old. Softdesk bought it. Then Autodesk bought it. Now it's in all the products. If you take a good look at Raster Tools, you'd say to yourself, whoa. I needed to do that once, and I didn't know how the heck I could get it done. And Raster Tools does just about anything with imagery-- file-based imagery. So if you've got imagery that's MrSID, and you wanted to save it out as JPEG 2K and create the [INAUDIBLE] file and everything else you might do, you can do that.

If you have Raster Imagery, and you want to convert it to CAD Objects, it'll do that. If you've got color, and you want to go to black and white, grayscale, it'll do all of of that. Raster Tools is a class unto itself. And of course, we have Map itself that has an image insert. We have ArcGIS online now. We have the connector for ArcGIS with InfraWorks. We've got lots of ways to bring imagery in.

So this time, what I'm going to do is show you a workflow that's a little bit different. It isn't really about importing. It isn't about importing a shapefile. It's about connecting to some data source out there. That data source could be ArcSDE. It could be a geodatabase, personal and file geodatabase. It could be a shapefile. It could be an AutoCAD SDF. So I'm actually going to connect to a data source this time.

Again, this is a feature in Map and Civil 3D, to be able to connect. This technology is pretty old. It's feature data objects, FDO. It doesn't create an AutoCAD Object. But what it creates is a Map Object, a Map Feature in your AutoCAD drawing. And this thing is layered on its own. It can be stylized very, very differently than you do with stylizing AutoCAD Objects with layers. This has stylization features that go way beyond that for labeling, creating thematics, and so forth.

So when you connect to the data source, and here are the data sources over on the left you can connect to, you bring in these things that are just like features. And you can use the geometry to create Civil 3D objects. If you edit them by checking out the object and then edit it with grip edits and then check it back in again, you're actually editing the shapefile in this case.

So you can actually connect to the data source, edit the feature, and then write it right back with check-in, check-out. So it does have bidirectionality. And it does let you extract the geometry for use in Civil 3D also. So this might be an alternative to importing when you have Esri data, whether it be a geodatabase or a shapefile, and bringing it in this way.

The reason why I like this is because the objects that are created, they're not on AutoCAD layers. They're not really AutoCAD Objects. They're map features. I have total control over them. But they're not getting in the way of my Civil 3D design. I have total control over their display order, their visibility, all of that, without getting in the way of all of my AutoCAD Objects that I might already have in there and my Civil 3D Objects. Use them as just a backdrop, no problem. So if you have shapefiles, you can connect to imagery. If you saw the data sources in FDO, it's extensive. But you still are connecting to a file-- a file.

So this polygon that you see coming in right here is a mercury polygon. And I selectively brought that in, because you can query the objects when you bring them in-- when you connect to them. And that red polygon that you see there is one of many locations on Semet Ponds. Semet Ponds is one of the locations here around this lake, one of the nastiest places on earth, I'm telling you. When a seagull lands here, it never takes off again. You stick a shovel in the ground, and you can bring up elemental mercury because of what was manufactured. There's tar here that has a pH less than 1. Is that possible? I think it is.

But look at the thematics I can do here with labeling, thematics all with this FDO connection. Again, where is this? It's in the Display Manager tab of the Map Task pane in Map 3D. Works beautifully with Civil 3D. I use it all the time. And I encourage my users. Our Civil 3D user base in the company is about 75 people. And I'm training them all the time and helping them through some of these things that they have to deal with.

So one of the other real benefits of this FDO connection to this file is that you can do analysis. You can do polygon analysis. So you can do points on polys, arcs on polys, and do analysis with this also. So right now, I'm actually bringing in these test pit points, buffering them according to a value that was taken right at the test pit. So I've buffered them. And then I'm going to overlay that over the buffer that I created around the mercury polygon and get the intersection of the two.

All the attribute data from this connected data source that I'm working with is all right there in a table and editable. I don't have to attach to it. It's right there with my connection to the shapefile. So the Feature Attribute table is there, and it's editable. And you can write it right back.

So this connection that you have with FDO is bidirectional. So this is what the Display Manager looks like. Of course, you can turn layers on and off. You can get whole groups of layers and connections and save them as an entire map and have a whole series of maps that you bring up just to show different things at different times that you might need to. And here is the polygon overlay for that.

So when I do this, you'll see the resultant polygon, which is the intersection of the buffer that I did around the red mercury polygon and the buffer around those test pits. And that becomes a layer unto itself. And you'll see the intersection there. I'm turning off the map base now, which is all of the AutoCAD Objects so you can really see that. And then that highlighted series of polygons right there is the intersection of the two.

So you can do analysis there. It's important-- and this will be in your handouts-- it's important that you see the results from importing from a shapefile and connecting to a shapefile with FDO. There is a difference, and it's right in AutoCAD. You'll see the difference.

Here, I'm connecting to a file geodatabase. So there is an FDO provider for that. You need to have an ArcMap or a PC-- well, you need either an ArcMap license or an ArcGIS Desktop license. Does not work with ArcGIS Pro yet, but that is going to change. But you need that license on the same PC. So I've actually connected to the geodatabase. And notice, it brought in all the features and layered them all for me. And there is the Feature Attribute table. So it works with file geodatabases beautifully. Do that all the time.

So when you connect to the source, you have connections, you create a Feature Class and you create features from this connection that you have. Notice, you also have ODBC. You have Oracle. SDF is Autodesk's kind of own version of a personal geodatabase from a drawing. We're going to actually use that in our final demonstration.

Now let's talk about this. Let's jump a little bit to something that was developed by Esri, and this is ArcGIS for AutoCAD. Been around for a long time. Some people know about it and say, I use this all the time. Some people say, I've never heard of this. They say, it's amazing. It has been around for a long time. It works inside Vanilla AutoCAD as well as Map and as well as Civil 3D.

So this product is mature, developed by Esri. It came around post the split up of Esri and Autodesk, as far as them developing their products and Autodesk went their way with AutoCAD Map. So ArcGIS for AutoCAD now has matured into something where it's basically you are now a client to ArcGIS Online in your AutoCAD session.

So you can bring any base maps in. You can bring in map services. You can feature services, features. And it creates Vanilla AutoCAD Objects in your drawing. It's all it creates. Pure Vanilla, no object data. The feature attributes are exposed. Everything is editable and bidirectional back to ArcGIS Online. But you're only creating just simple AutoCAD objects, almost like the import thing, very close to that.

So the interoperability thing here gets actually upped an ante here. So you say, how does this play into the relationship between Autodesk and Esri? I don't know about the future of this, but I know it's successful, and it's clean. I mean, Esri developers and Autodesk developers, these people create great software. So Esri has been doing this for a while inside of AutoCAD. The product manager for this is very dedicated and does a great job. So I'm bringing in a map service right now for my base map. And these are coming right from your ArcGIS Online service.

And right now, Esri has some kind of a special that they're running. So if you're an InfraWorks user, a Civil 3D user, they have some trial for ArcGIS Online or something. You have to look into that. But they want to get people with subscriptions to this. So if your company isn't using ArcGIS Online yet, it's a good opportunity now to do this.

So you actually select a server, and you select the feature source from that server. We use ArcGIS Online, and we have our own portal developed. So you have an API there so you can customize this thing to the help. So it looks exactly the way you want to for your users. So when you actually publish data to ArcGIS Online, the right person, the right group, the right organization sees exactly the feature sources that you want them to.

So I brought in a soils map from-- that's from Public. I'm connecting to a different service now-- different server now. And it'll list my feature services as I go in, and here they all are. And this is directly from ours at OBG. And it's creating simple AutoCAD Objects, yes, but they are layered for you. And when you go to that layer and edit those AutoCAD Objects, they get written back to the feature service.

Or you can have it so there is no synchronization at all. So you can actually bring them in read-only or bring them in so they are linked. So you can see I have an option right there to Extract or to Add. If I add, it's bidirectional. If I make an edit or add something to that layer, I just created a new feature.

So I brought in the site boundaries. You can see there is the image. You can see part of the soil map. It all comes back. The site boundaries right there are in magenta. They are coming from a Feature Service on ArcGIS Online. So with ArcGIS for AutoCAD, which is what you're looking at here, it has its own ribbon, has its own toolbar. They did a great job with this.

It also helps the other way. If you are prepping drawings that you want to be consumed by the ArcGIS Pro user, this is the best way, because this will create feature services. It'll create a feature source and features, so that when they bring that DWG into ArcGIS Online, it's all ready to go. See, it saves them a lot of time. Things are organized more in the way they're used to seeing it. You're not just giving them a CAD drawing with layers.

So the attributes are all exposed, of course. And if it's not read-only, you can edit things also. So now, we're starting to look a little closer here at situations where we have our CAD session, and somehow now we are not only connected possibly to BIM 360 in the cloud, but we are also connected to our ArcGIS Online. So we've got our two cloud repositories here.

So as these two companies come together and jointly develop more and more products and add-ons, that's going to have to be a consideration as we're going. So like I said here, you can actually create features on layers for the user-- the ArcGIS user or ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Pro-- to actually consume that drawing file.

So in ArcGIS Pro, which is of course, the latest version of ArcGIS, what is Esri doing to keep up with what we're trying to accomplish here? Because this relationship between the two companies is a game changer. And it's going to be necessary as far as our future products that we deliver to our clients are concerned. If you're dealing with things like smart cities, starting to get into areas where the intelligence of the deliverable is off the scale, we have to have these two companies working together.

So this is ArcGIS Pro right here. And it's the same site. And the nice thing about ArcGIS Pro now is that it will bring in a Revit file. So if you have a building in Revit, you can actually bring the building in to ArcGIS Pro. So for GIS purists, they see this and, ah, because for them to see 3D in ArcGIS like this and spinning buildings around, what the heck is this world coming to?

The two groups are going to have to now start coming together like they never have before for us to get to where we need to be in the industry and for our deliverables to our clients. So I selected the window. I don't know if I selected it yet, but if I select the window, all of the family information from the Revit file is all right here in ArcGIS Pro. Spin the thing around. You can notice everything from the Revit file is all there in layers, and I can control visibility. You will see more happening with this, I can assure you.

So this is what our portal looks like at OBG, O'Brien and Gere. This is what it looks like. When you go in here, you use a web browser to view any features, maps, anything that we may publish from ArcGIS to ArcGIS Online. It's all federated. It's all secure. It's all in one place. The mobile solutions from Esri now, like Survey123, that allow you, with a phone, to go in the field, collect data, actually gets posted right to ArcGIS Online. And that InfraWorks user will see it in real time. It is all working beautifully. We actually do that on a regular basis now. So the mobile solution.

So if you're an InfraWorks user in the InfraWorks community, as far as the Autodesk scheme of things, I would say is the fastest-growing community right now. Just in my experience out there just training and so forth. Lots of interest in InfraWorks now. It's part of the AEC collection.

So if you've got the AEC collection, InfraWorks is included in that now. It was kind of off by itself, and the licensing was in, you know. Now, it's part of the collection. So if you have the collection, you have InfraWorks. If you use InfraWorks, and you're using just Model Builder and just connecting to data sources that are files, you're missing the boat.

What we need is a connector, a connector in InfraWorks that actually connects us to ArcGIS Online so that whole world of ArcGIS Online, public, organizational, mine, is all available to me in InfraWorks. And that's what the ArcGIS-- the connector for ArcGIS is inside of InfraWorks. So you have the benefits there of an abundant data set from ArcGIS Online.

Model Builder. I still use Model Builder once in a while just to get things started quick and dirty. But of course, the data set that you're pulling from is very limited there. Here, with ArcGIS Online, the data set is unlimited. And it's all secure, and it brings it in, and you can do everything that you can do just when you connect to a file.

So here I am in InfraWorks, and I'll start a new project in InfraWorks. These are all proposals that I have done. So what is InfraWorks? If you haven't done any investigation on InfraWorks, what is it? It's kind of like-- oh, it's so hard to describe. I'm not going to say it's a blend of GIS and CAD, because it is not. It is used 0% to 30%. It's great for proposal, decent visualization, lots of smarts, analysis tools, simulation tools, works with large amounts of data, great for early project experience with the client, alternatives, design alternatives without having to bring it over into CAD yet.

So while I'm in InfraWorks here, what I did was I used the ArcGIS Connector and got right into ArcGIS Online. And from here, everything that I'm supposed to see, I can see. And I can get it right into InfraWorks. It is not bidirectional. If I edit it in InfraWorks, it will not go back yet. But it is refreshable. If that data source changes, and I do a Refresh in InfraWorks, it will go fetch me the latest, greatest.