Investigating the Geotechnical Modeler in Civil 3D

SAM LUCIDO: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Autodesk University 2022. This class is named Investigating the Geotechnical Modeler in Civil 3D. My name is Sam Lucido. I'm a design systems administrator. And you can find me CADproTips.

A little bit about myself, I'm a design systems administrator with a company named CHA Consultants. We are a Midwest environmental engineering firm. We have focusing on buildings, power, infrastructure, aviation, sports, and all kinds of different things focusing on the AEC Collection and Autodesk software. I've been using AutoCAD since the early 1990s.

Yes. To answer your question, I did start out using the drafting board in my college days and even in high school. I've been using Civil 3D and Map 3D since 2007. I started with Softdesk, Land Development Desktop, and a few other CAD programs. I know Bricks CAD, Visual CAD, Generic CAD, and a few other CAD programs.

I'm a technical writer for AUGIWorld world and a former AUGI board of directors member. If you want to join a good group, AUGI is good to join. It's free, and there are a lot of benefits even for the professional membership.

I'm a certified professional in AutoCAD and Civil 3D. And I've been an Autodesk Expert Elite member since 2015. I did take the certification test not only a year ago. They have changed. So if you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them for you either after the class or online.

I'm the owner of a blog named cadprotips.com, and you can see my logo up on the top. That is where I house ideas, tips, and tricks. And how this blog started years ago was my way of collecting information and knowing what it was.

And my job here-- I always put down on my slides I've taught at AU for several years. If I can teach you one thing and make you think, I've done my job. I want to be able to show you something in the Geotechnical Modeler that you didn't know, if you didn't know you could import stratum surfaces, create subsurface profiles, export to InfraWorks. Just the one thing, and then I think I've done my job.

We're going to go through the summary. I'm not going to read you PowerPoints. This is going to mostly be a live presentation. Geotechnical engineering is a very important aspect of our design. What is underneath the ground determines how we build bridges, roads, waterways, and how we examine Civil 3D data.

The Geotechnical Modeler came out in February, I think, 22nd of 2002. And I was extremely interested in it. I used to use other software, which I know many people use, add-ons for Civil 3D and another software program, modeling geology within the Earth.

I've taken files from gINT, brought them in DXF, scaled them, x and y, done them manually exploded into millions of pieces. And I just want to show you how efficient and how fluid this can be as a workflow. And finally, most importantly, I want you to bring back value to your employer and give you the knowledge to excel within your field.

We all want to improve and grow. And we all want to do things in a more efficient manner. But we also have to use the go slow to go fast theme and make sure it's correct. This is a good way to capture that data.

Our learning objectives today, and we're going to go through each one of these separately. The first one is we're going to learn about geotechnical data and see how to manage it by using the modeler in Civil 3D. I'm going to show you the spreadsheets that are used to import and how they import into the program. We're going to learn how to create and import the data directly into your drawings and then actually create different types of things.

We're going to build and create stratum surfaces directly from the modeler, not by points, and then we're going to build profiles from those surfaces in Civil 3D. And finally, we're going to learn about exporting the 3D boreholes from Civil and importing them into InfraWorks for visual presentation. A lot of times, showing somebody something visually in 3D can give that moment to them that, ah, I get it now, I understand it, instead of a flat 2D drawing.

So with that being said, let's get started. We're going to flip over to Civil. We're going to go to the Autodesk account first and show you how to install the module. And then we'll go right into our Civil drawing.

So the first thing we did, we started up with a site plan here. And I'm going to launch my Autodesk account. And I'm going to show you how to install the Civil 3D Geotechnical Modeler. Give me a second here.

I'm going to pull my window over to show you on the Autodesk account. When you log into your Autodesk account, you come up here. And it says product updates. And what you need to do is you need to let this load. This just changed, so there's a lot of different updates.

What I like to do is just type civil at the command prompt. And you can see right down here. We come down, and we pull down Geotechnical Modeler extension for Civil 3D 2023. We'll select that. We download it. You can see this has been updated a few times since February. And we install it that way.

The other way to install the modeler is through the desktop app, which if your company allows it, a lot of companies restrict these. And you'll see the extension show up on Civil 3D over here. And if you don't have it installed, it'll show up right there. And you'll be good to go. So those are the two ways to install the modeler.

After the modeler gets installed, you'll see I have a drawing open up here. You open up Civil 3D. And on the Home tab of the ribbon you can see there's an additional tab, Geotechnical Modeler. And I'm going to pull this out simply by just left clicking my mouse and pulling out to show you.

There's only two panels. There's the Help panel. And then there's this panel. We're going to work from left to right. We're going to manage the data. We're going to build our surfaces. We're going to display the surfaces. We're going to create some profiles. And then we're going to show you 2D stick logs, 3D boreholes, and the export function.

What's new is the hatch style editor, which came out on the first beta of this. So if you install the February version and haven't updated, I think you'll find this one very helpful. Let me pull this back up on the ribbon. And that concludes our introduction of the modeler. And now, we're going to go back to our PowerPoint and look at our objectives one more time.

So our first objective is to learn about geotechnical data and see how to manage it by using the modeler. So what we want to do on the first objective is we're going to create a project. We already showed you the model or extension, how to load it in the model on the ribbon. The first thing we have to do is create the project and review the database. Let's go back to Autodesk.

We're now in Civil 3D. The main thing we need to do is have a coordinate system. I can go into my application menu up here and pull it down and go into drawing settings, or I can check my site plan here. Let's pull here, Drawing Utilities, Drawing Settings.

And you can see, I currently have this at NAD83 Colorado State Plane. Your drawing should be set. But more importantly, what I like to do is I go to the Geolocation tab, turn on the aerial, just to get a good idea of where I'm located in the world to see that this is lined up. And you can see we're good.

The goal for this project, we have roads here. We have roads here. And you can see we're going to build an alignment here. And we're going to build an alignment on the side. More to that to come. Let's turn the map off.

So we've got our coordinate system set. We have our map. We don't have to have a map. But we need a coordinate system. Let's go to the modeler and start with step one, manage the data. What type of data are we managing? I'm going to right click. I'm going to go out to my data set.

You're going to see the data in here are called location details and field descriptions. When I open the location details, you're going to see an Excel CSV file. The two formats that the modeler can format in are CSV and AGS right now and gINT right now. There are other formats coming in the way.

But what we need are these headers. We need the location. Let me do this. Double click here. Location type, which will determine what type of style we'll use when we brought in. You see how I put DP down here and BH here, BH for borehole and drill point down here for the manholes. Northing and easting, the ground level, and the final depth.

This final depth is important for the second piece of the data. Let's look at the second piece. I'm not going to save this. The second piece is your field descriptions. This is if you were to export something from gINT, you get the field descriptions. Remember on B1, our final depth was 66? We have five geologic descriptions in this one.

I'm going to click here and double click again. And what they are is topsoil, sand, clay, gravel, limestone. We didn't want to get too complicated because we just want to see the functionality of the modeler and how it works within Civil 3D.

Legend codes can be added. I added a couple in there just to check that and also descriptions over here. But these headers need to be the same in order for the modeler to read the files.

That is your data. There's also what you can do as an inclination file to change the orientation of the drill hole. We're going to X out of here. So those are our files. We're going to import CSV files for this project.

So the first thing we're going to do is create a project. Manage Data, and you can see it comes up and says a warning because I was testing. We had an AU 2022, but we're going to make a new one. We're going to call this New Project. I'm going to call this AU2022NewOrleans. We'll do NO. Select OK.

And you can see, import [INAUDIBLE]. But the problem is we don't have our project coordinate system set. So we have our drawing set, but let's set our project coordinate system. We're going to do the same thing. We know it's CO83. We're going to come right in here. We're going to type in CO83 central. CO83. NAD83 Colorado State Plane central. Select. Select OK.

OK, so now we have our coordinate system set. Now, we can import the data from the file. That was our first learning objective was creating the project and importing the data from the file. Import. We're going to import the CSV. See how there's three locations? We have AGS. We have against CSV, and a CSV. You could go it again and export to that XLS file or CSV file and then take out the headers you don't need.

So we're going to import CSV. I'm going to go. I'm going to import the location details on this one. And you're going to see if there was an error that the modeler will bring up a window in this area here and say stratum surface doesn't match on B3, the top or the bottom. You would see it.

But right now, you can see everything seems to look pretty good. The common [INAUDIBLE], all of the information's in there. The lithologies covered too. You can see I've got our codes. In the whole orientation, we didn't have that on ours.

So we're not going to load a field map. We're going to keep everything the same. And we're going to import the data. 30 boreholes added, 150 stratum surfaces added. Select OK.

Now, we can select these two different things to filter, but we're going to add the boreholes right to our drawing. Now, watch what happens. I'm going to move this over here, add it to the drawing. 30 added, zoom to the extents? Of course I want to see the extents. Zoom to the extents. Hit close.

And you can see this is what we get, COGO points. COGO points brought into our drawing under a style. And you see how BH is there because remember, we used that style BH. And under the MW-1. I'm going to hit Escape. You can see how the DP for the drill point for that more. More or less just an example.

So COGO points. So what can we do with these COGO points? Let's talk just a little bit about filtering the points and how we can do that. And then we'll talk about the local database. Because a lot of you, I think what somebody's going to ask is, Sam, how can I have access to multiple people to work on the same project?

Good question. Right now, the local database is local. It's on your C drive. The Geotechnical Modeler in the works I'm sure is going to have something like a data shortcut manager or a project location manager where you can change that. Right now to change that, you simply would have to go to Notepad and open up this application config file. You see where it's located? C, programdata, Autodesk, Geotechnical Modeler, and then application config.

And underneath here, you're going to see the actual where the configuration is, the database, which is right there. Yes, that can be changed to a network location. The only key is you'll have to provide that config file in that location to each user so it points to that data. But I do see that changing in the future.

In the past versions of the modeler, there wasn't a hatch style config. You had to edit hatch styles within the Notepad. So that was another advancement and improvement. OK, so that's the database.

Let's talk about filtering borehole data. Let's say we want to filter borehole data. We want to just see a couple borings or something. I'm going to pull this down and turn on a layer called polyline our boreholes. Select Close.

So say I just want to look at the boreholes in this data. There's two ways we can filter it. I'm going to go back to prospector and look at my point groups. I have GM filtered boreholes and GM boreholes. And right now, these are all the COGO points with all their data attached to it. And you can see, you can access all of the data and the depths. But the filtered boreholes is the same thing. There's nothing filtered yet.

We're still on the Manage button of the geotechnical model panel on the ribbon. I'm going to go to filter data down here. So let's do a depth. Well, no, we'll do a polyline first. We're going to select the polyline. And I'm going to select that polyline.

But I'm going to zoom. I'm going to close that here because I want to zoom out and show you. I'm going to show you how the other ones disappear. So I'm going to select my polyline. Select this. Apply the filter. And watch these boreholes in these different areas disappear. Close. Close.

Well, let's reset our filter. I'm going to reset the filter because-- that didn't seem to work. Use bounded polylines. Select Filter. Select OK. Apply it. And you can see there. You have to reset that filter to reconfigure that back in. And we can do the same thing.

Let's reset the filter again. And let's say we want to look at all the lines with a depth greater than-- all of the points with a depth greater than 65. Apply the filter. You can see some of them disappeared. I'm going to close.

I'm going to go back out to my all boreholes, which is here. My filtered boreholes, which are not all of them, but their depths, if I pull this over to their depths, you can see they're greater than 65. So those are the two ways you can filter data in the Geotechnical Modeler.

Next up, we are going to build our stratum surfaces. So I'm going to go back to PowerPoint. We learned how to create and import the geotechnical data by using the location details, that CSV file, with the file headers that were in there. And then we also added all the borings to our drawing that was how we imported the sample data and did that.

Now, what we need to do is go on to the second part of this. And we learn how to build the stratum surfaces and create the subsurface profiles in Civil 3D. Back to Civil. Let's just delete my filter poly. Well, we can delete it. And then we'll just go to our filters, and we'll turn everything back on.

Zoom to the extents, and here's our drawing right there. So stratum surfaces, how do we want to create the stratum surfaces? So you can see all of these boreholes contain data. They contain clay, topsoil, limestone. And they can create surfaces.

Back in the past, how I used to do this, say if I wanted the top of clay, or I wanted to extract that volume of data, I would have to create points at each level and then create a surface that way. This way, what we have to do in the modeler is we can just--

I'm going to freeze a layer, so it's clear. So I'm just going to freeze a couple of layers and freeze this layer, and this layer, this layer so we can just kind of see what's going on here. This layer and this layer, OK. Might as well freeze this one too. OK.

So now, we're going to create our surfaces. Back in the ribbon tab, so we're done with our Manage Data. We're going to build our surfaces. What do we want to do? We want to build top surfaces and build stratum surfaces. We do have the ability to do the dynamic differential, which helps on hilly areas with the triangulation of the modeler.

I'm going to close out of here because I want to go back to my settings and show my surfaces because I want to show how this pops up. So watch this. Over in this area right here, watch this area because we're going to populate surfaces as we build.

Build the stratum surfaces. I'm going to build the top. I'm just going to build them from here. I'm going to select Build. And it's building. You notice everything in the side. So I've got clay, gravel, limestone, sand, and topsoil. Close.

Let's display the-- left to right again. We're on display the stratum surfaces. I'm going to do triangles and borders just because I want to see the model visibility. And in the model, I'm going to do triangles and borders as well. And I'm going to apply my settings.

Close. Now, it doesn't look like much happened. But if I switch over to 3D, which I'm going to do right now, you can see my surfaces are here. I'm going to turn off my existing grade surface and put no display because I'm not really concerned about the existing grade right now. Apply. Apply. And then I'm going to apply a visual style to our model or surfaces of a realistic one so we can see exactly what's going on with the modeler.

So as you can see, we have the tops of these surfaces and the bottoms. And we can fill them in. We don't have the boreholes created yet, but we're going to do that next. But you can see that's how you build your stratum surfaces in Civil 3D.

Next up, what we're going to do is we're going to create the alignments and then build the subsurface profiles. Back to the view cube. I love the Home tab. We're going to use a several times. By using the Home tab, you can find the best location you want.

Let's turn our visual style back to the shaded. I'm going to zoom to the extents. I'm going to turn my layers back on so we can see everything. I do a Select All. Undo. And undo. So we've got everything back on.

Let's turn off our contours that we use to build our surface and turn our existing grade back on. Surface properties. Let's do, I think it was 2 and 10. Surface properties. 1 and 5 design. OK, there we go. 1 and 5 design. So we're back to where we need to be.

And what I want to do is I'm going to right click my Home. And I'm going to Set the Current View as Home. So now, if I go back to 3D, and I start doing all this, I can just go Home, and I'll be back to where I need to be on the Home tab. Right there.

So now, what we need to do is create-- in order to do a subsurface profile, we need to create alignments. And we have to do that the old-- not the old-fashioned way but the normal way in Civil 3D. So under the Manage tab of the ribbon or under the-- I'm sorry, under the Home tab of the ribbon, under alignment, we're going to do Create Alignment From Objects.

And we're going to create two alignments. The first alignment is going to be this one, which is our proposed road. And the second alignment is going to be this one over here. I'm going to send this to the back.

I want to send these guys to the back so I can see my polyline. And you can see, it's right there. I could have done it a different way. But you can see, I need to select that polyline. This one is going to be the side, called side. And this one is going to be proposed road.

So let's create two alignments from objects. And we'll make sure that arrow is pointing this way. Alignment, Create Alignment From Objects. I'm going to select this polyline for the center of the road. The arrow was pointing in the right direction.

I'm just going to select Enter and call this one Geotechnical Modeler Proposed Roadway. I'm going to leave everything else the same for right now. And we're going to erase the existing line and select OK because we just want to see the alignment.

Let's do the second alignment. Create Alignment From Objects. Alignment, Create Alignment From Objects. Home tab of the ribbon. Let me turn these off so I can see the alignment really quick. It's not picking it because of the display order, so I'm just going to turn some surfaces off really quick.

And then we'll-- actually, we could use the modeler to do this. Let's do the modeler. Stratum Display, Triangles, Borders. Model, Triangles, Triangles, Borders, Apply. And turn them off. That was much easier to do it that way. And that's a good way to do it.

So let's go back to the Home tab and create our second alignment. Create Alignment From Objects. This is already alignment right now. So what I'm going to do is explode it because we want to change it. I'm going to join the polyline.

So right now, it's a polyline and another polyline. So we might have to do this again on our alignment. So let's just join these really quick. And we'll do this one more time. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I must have grouped them together. So now, we have one polyline here. And then we're going to join this one. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. OK, so we have a polygon here and a polyline here.

So basically, let's go through the alignment exercise again. Objects, Select, keep it, jam proposed roadway, OK. Alignment. Let's see the arrow. Yep, keep it. So this is GM proposed side. GM is for the geotechnical modeler.

Let's change our scale a hundred just so you can see. We're going to add a scale so we can see the actual fonts on this a little bit bigger. And then we'll just change it just so we can see how things look. And you can see, there's our two alignments and our borehole data, which is located within our drawing.

Now, let's create two profiles. We're going to create two quick profiles. And then we're going to go into the exporting to 3D. So the first profile we're going to create is along our road. And the next profile we're going to create is along our side.

So underneath the geotechnical modeler, Subsurface Profiles. And you can see, we have proposed roadway and proposed side. We do want to make this some sort of a logical name, so GM Proposed Roadway. And you could just say first one or first alignment.

And you can see, all of this data here is grayed out right now. That's not going to be grayed out until you touch something here. And then it's ungrayed. We're going to use the top surface. We're going to do this. And we are going to have to select our boreholes.

So let's go through here and select our boreholes. I'll just select them one by one. Since I increased the scale, I can see them fairly well. And there's the warning sign. I want to show you how to get rid of that as well while we're in here.

So we selected our boreholes. We hit Enter. Sample data left, we have some things we can do. We can do Grid Lines, Stick Log Center, Vertical Scale. We can solid fill the strata. We're going to leave everything the way it is now just to show you what the modeler does when it creates it.

So let's create the profile. Just as you would in Civil 3D, you're going to set it over here. And it's going to come back and say 16 stick logs have been created. I'm going to close.

Now, I have my scale set-- let me go back to that window-- to 1 to 100. So let's go back to the 40 scale to make it visually more appealing. And then we're going to update our profile and close. And you can see, our closed profiles are back the way we want to be.

Now, how great is that that I can take geotechnical information from Excel files and display on a Civil 3D profile and updating the way it is? You can see, we're missing data out here for the stratum. But these basically connect.

And now if these don't connect, a lot of times, if the boring is offset from your alignment, it's going to be offset. These are going right down the middle. So yeah, they do connect right there in that area. Let's do the second one for the side. And then we're going to flip it over to 3D.

So create Subsurface Profile. And we're going to go side, GM Proposed Side. Second profile. Remember that'll ungray out what you do there. I'm going to select my boreholes again. I'm going to come back here. I'm going to select these. I could use a window polygon window fence. It's just going to select my COGO points.

You see, this one's a little bit off? That'll be displayed when you do the profile. Select Enter. Again, I'm going to leave it the same way we did before. Create the profile. I'm going to put it right underneath it here. 6 sticklogs. Close.

Alt-Tab back to my Civil 3D. And you can see how these were created. So that is how you do your Civil. And now, this is a Civil 3D profile, which is just as any other Civil 3D profile in Civil is worked. It's dynamic.

As long as you're connected to the database that provides the data, you can edit it. If another user opens it up, it's a block. These are going to end up being blocks. It's a block reference. They're not going to be able to edit anything, but they can actually print it and see the data. And you can see how it has our text fields in the air.

So let's say we want to-- excuse me. Let's say we want to display this data in some kind of 3D view, like the cross-section in the view. So let's look at 3D boreholes first. And then we'll do a 3D export.

We're going to live on this tab. Sticklogs, Boreholes, and Export. So now that we've got these, we want to display the boreholes in 2D. Let's look at the 2D sticklogs first. By selecting that, you're going to say, OK, I want to create 2D sticklogs.

This is very good for the geotechnical engineers and the project managers to analyze the data on a map. A lot of times, you're not going to print this out and send it to the client. But it does provide a lot of value when writing the report. I'm simply going to create the sticklogs. And watch down here. The sticklogs are created, and again, annotative.

Now, I wish there was a variable that would control this to send it down below here. But right now, there's not. So you can see, my topsoils down to 10. My boring depth is 60. And that's how it goes. And the same data is displayed within the profile over here on the right.

So I really like this data for analyzing it and viewing. If we're building a road, we want to know if there's any material underneath there that's going to affect how we design this. And then for the sticklogs, we just simply erase those. And they go away. So that's how you do the 2D sticklogs.

Let's do the 3D borehole. Same thing, 3D. We're going to take the 3D boreholes and create them. It's going to look like nothing's happened. And so I'm going to close my window. But as with any other 3D program, we're going to have to flip it and look at the visual style.

[INAUDIBLE]. Remember, I set that Home tab. And we're going to look at our borings. It doesn't look like much. Let's change our visual style to realistic. And you can see, there's our top surface right there, got my little triangulation going there.

But let me look underneath here, and we'll look at the 3D boreholes. Let's do this one more time. And you can see, they're displaying right there. They have to zoom in a little bit. So there is my boreholes underneath there. So I've created 3D boreholes underneath my surface.

And I could display my limestone surface underneath here too if I wanted to, if I really wanted to show that. But I think it's more visually represented in an InfraWorks flow rather than a Civil 3D. This gives us the ability to take and say, OK, if this red area was contamination, we could take and cut a volume from our volumes dashboard. We could easily do a volume by analyzing the top and bottom of these two surfaces along our site. So that's how we would do that as well.

Let's go back. Remember, the Home tab on the ribbon. Change our visual style. Change that back to 2D wireframe. And we're back to where we are on here.

Next up, what we want to do is take one of these cross-sections and profiles and show them in 3D, like stripe them in 3D. So let's go back to my PowerPoint and see where we're at. Learn about exporting the 3D boreholes from Civil 3D and importing them into InfraWorks.

That's our last objective. We're going to review the objectives one more time. But let's go back to here to Civil. And now, we're back in here.

What I really would like to do right now is we're going to talk about pushing this side one out to 3D view. But let's review the hatch editor very quickly. And then we're going to talk about a couple other things and then go into InfraWorks.

So you can see, under the geotechnical modeler, we covered managing the data, building your surfaces, stratum surface display, subsurface profiles, 2D sticklogs, 3D boreholes, 3D export-- now, we have not done the 3D export just yet, but we will-- and the hatch style editor.

I wanted to show the hatch style editor because this just came out in the second beta release, and I really, really like it. So say we have topsoil here. Let's go to the hatch style. You can see I've changed a few of these.

It's as simple as taking the topsoil, and just say I want to change it to yellow. But not only yellow, but I want to make it some kind of pattern. I don't know the scale, but I'm going to apply it. Select OK. The hatch style was saved.

And now, we're going to rebuild it. You have to go back to the profile, and you have to update it. Update. Closes. Keeps flipping me back there. And the profile is updated as you can see right here.

I have to change-- I did the second one. I have to change the data on there, I mean, the lines, the scale of it to make it show up. But the hatch style editor, it'll do exactly that for what you want to do with all these. The more you add to this, the more it'll be intuitive with what you're doing.

Now, keep in mind, if user A changes the clay to a certain scale, if you're on a network, user B's going to have that change on his project as well. So that's where you have to manage the data. Be effective with it as you do it. My hatch style was saved, and we're good to go.

So let's talk about exporting this right here into a 3D export. So I'm going to do 3D export. I'm Subsurface Profiles. And I want to export to 3D. Copy to 3D. That's what I want to do. But which one do I want to copy? I want to copy the side one to 3D.

But the one thing we have to do before-- the one catch on this is you have to change your vertical scale. So we have to update the scales to 1. Hit Close. Go back to my Civil.

And you can see how this one is updated? That second one doesn't seem to want to update. But we're going to use the side one anyway. We have to do that first in order to export it the 3D.

We're going to go Subsurface Profiles, Copy To 3D. I'm going to select automatically. [INAUDIBLE] 3D invisible in model view. So it copied both of them. I'm going to close. And you're asking, well, what happened? Nothing really until I go to 3D. So let's go to 3D.

Let's move this down and take a look at our profiles in 3D. And you can see that they're right there. I'm going to turn off my top surface so we can see it a little bit. That white seems to be showing that.

But you see how this side view? This is what I want it to show. I mean, I could show a realistic view in here. But this is another way to display your data for people. And they can see it in here. You can see, there's my site. And here's my cross-section of those boreholes.

Now, there's one thing that you're noticing on here. And you're saying, Sam, well, why is everything reversed? Good question. We can go back here on the modeler. Subsurface Profiles, this button right here, the mirror text.

I'm going to select it, and watch what happens. Your text should be mirrored, which it didn't. But it mirrors the text when you do that. Let's try that one more time. Update. close. Close, and your text is mirrored back. So that's how you export to 3D these profiles.

So I kind of like that. I really like the ability to actually do that and actually see my borehole data on my site and then my profile right there, which is pretty cool for a presentation or to show a client. Again, Home tab of the ribbon-- or I'm sorry, Home tab of the view cube, and we're back to where we need to be. We can change our profile scale back if we want to. But at this point, I think what we're going to do is focus more on the InfraWorks part of thing.

So we covered pretty much a lot that's going on within this modeler. That is the basics of what you can do. Sticklogs, create them. They'll come back up here. Close. Regenerate. I got to change my visual style.

Visual styles are funny because if you don't change them, you're going to end up with a lot of different things. A lot of these are annotated. So if I went to 100, you're going to see things get bigger. And then I'll redo those. But I'll go back to 40, and they'll be the same.

So now, what we want to do is take our data. I'm going to erase this one just for now. And we'll have that second one. We'll do the update. Let's update our profile just to make sure it updates back to the 40 scale. 5. There we go. So there's our profile, and that's our drawing. So those are the key elements of the geotechnical modeler.

The one thing I was confused about when I first started doing this was, well, if the database is stored locally, how do we delete the project? So basically, I like using autocomplete. If you type GM, anything with the preface of GM will have all the modeler commands.

You could see, there's a couple we haven't covered, Debugging on and off, Erase Application Settings, Fence Diagrams. But the one I do want to cover is GM Delete Project. So I'm going to go back up to the Manage Data. And you can see, we have AU2022NO.

But I'm going to go on to a new drawing. I'm going to Manage Data. And you can see, I have a project here. There's one called TEST. I want to delete that.

So I'm just going to type GM Delete Project. Enter the project name. You have to know the name of this. It's not going to bring up a list. AU2022_TEST. And then you have to type Yes in this field in order for it to delete from the database.

So it was deleted. Your project was deleted. It'll no longer show up when I do Manage Data and bring in the project. We only have our New Orleans one there.

That's the way to manage it. But just remember the database. Remember the hatch config settings and the actual database product settings are located out on your C program files underneath that geotechnical modeler plugin.

OK, so next up, let's talk about InfraWorks for just a little bit and how we can display the geotechnical modeler in 3D. This covers everything we needed to cover from a standpoint of our objectives. But now, we want to take this to another level and take it to 3D.

So back in the ribbon, let's open InfraWorks. So we launched InfraWorks. And what we have in InfraWorks is our site. I've already created a site. And you can see, I just used Model Builder in InfraWorks.

If you're not familiar with InfraWorks, Model Builder, you can build a site based on an area. And right here is our actual area that we're going to focus on because we want to build a road from here to here. And then we also wanted to check the borings on the side of the road there.

So how do we bring that data into InfraWorks from Civil 3D? Let's go back to Civil. And what we're going to do is on the geotechnical model tab, we're going to export, 3D Export. We're going to make two exports.

The first export we're going to do is just a 3D drawing based on just those boreholes. Export. Export. Data Set, 3D boreholes. So we're going to export those 3D boreholes.

And what it's going to do is I'm going to just say 3D boreholes-test because it's going to ask me if I want to bring up the drawing after I do it. 180 objects are exported. Open up in a new drawing? Yeah, let's look at this one and take a look at it first.

So this is what it exported, a 3D drawing. Looks like not much, right? So again, we're going to move out to our visual style. And you can see, there's our borings in 3D with all of our data.

Again, View tab you can change it to shade it to make it look prettier and things like that to view. So but that's basically our drawing right there. We're going to X out of here. We don't really need to do anything with it.

The second thing we want to do is back-- I'm going to X out of this drawing-- is export the surfaces to a Civil 3D drawing. So let's go into the geotechnical modeler again, 3D Export. I can select them all and then run the export same as before. And I'll do test two again. I like doing test just because it's going to ask me to open.

This is an error that's going to happen. It's an error, a bug in the program. It will happen every time you do this. Simply select OK, and your drawing is going to be created. Do you want to open it up? We don't have to open this one up to see it. We know what's going to happen. We're going to select No.

So now that we've got both of these 3D drawings created, what can we do with them in InfraWorks visually, say, for a presentation for a client? So under Data Connect-- InfraWorks is very intuitive. But what we want to make sure is now we're on the correct coordinate system, the Colorado State Plane one.

But we want to make-- in our data. So that's the first thing we do. When we set up our map, we want to make sure we're in the correct coordinate system so that the data we bring in shows up correctly.

So we're going to connect to our data sources. I just simply select my data source here to display it on the ribbon. The first thing I'm going to do is connect to an AutoCAD 3D object drawing, which is our boreholes. I'm going to go back to my project, Data Set, and my 3D boreholes.

I'm going to select that one. And you can see, it's going to connect to the data source, upload it to the cloud. This one's a local database for InfraWorks, but it's still going to take a little bit to do. And you can kind of see them a little bit if you zoom way in.