Weapon of Mass Production: Harnessing the Power of the AEC Industry Collection

JERRY BARTELS: Welcome to our session. We're glad you made it. We're glad you made it out to AU. We always appreciate the opportunity to come out here and present and share a little bit about what we know and the things that we've been working on with some folks that are equally excited about technology and learning about how to use the tools.

We're Jerry and Jeff Bartels. For the most part, we're interchangeable. I'm the better looking of the two, arguably. We're actually 2/3 of a set of triplets. So and for those people that are watching the recording at some point in the future, we've been told we look just like Brad Pitt, all right? So we'll paint the visual before we get started.

Jeff and I have worked in a number of different areas of the infrastructure industry. Between the two of us, it's almost 50 years. Got started in the late '80s when we were about 16 or 15 years old, and then worked our way forward. We've been involved in actual production, and then got into some education. We've both been involved in consulting. We've been at Autodesk now for a while.

We've done some creative stuff as well. I was the mayor in the community where I live. And Jeff has been involved in some things with Lynda.com and doing recordings. So we've got a lot of experience with a lot of tools, both from creating things using the tools, receiving some things that were created as a result of other people using the tools.

So what we want to do is share a little bit of that experience in a session today, where we're going to talk about the AEC Collection and how we can use that on a land development project. What we've found is a lot of folks maybe gravitate to Civil 3D as being the primary thing that they're accustomed to, maybe a little bit of InfraWorks, and then wonder, well, what else can I use some of these other tools for? So we're going to walk through a little bit of that process today.

Did you have anything you wanted to throw out--

JEFF BARTELS: No.

JERRY BARTELS: --before we going? OK.

JEFF BARTELS: That pretty much covered it.

JERRY BARTELS: We run a blog, that we do Civil 3D tips and tricks. We also get into other things that are infrastructure-related. Has anybody been to the blog? Outstanding. OK. It's being recorded, everybody. Fantastic.

JEFF BARTELS: Yeah, Civil Immersion. If you just look for civilimmersion.typepad.com. And we'll have the link up there.

JERRY BARTELS: We post things throughout the year on a weekly basis.

So anyway, our intention, we'll be going through our overview. These are the learning objectives that we had set for the session.

We're pretty much a PowerPoint-free zone. We like to avoid PowerPoint. We like to avoid videos. We like to go in and do everything live. Adds a certain element of risk and danger that makes it exciting for everybody involved.

We heard that the group that was in here last was having some serious projector issues, so we're just assuming that was a fluke. We heard one of them had a Mac. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Everything seems to be working all right for us now. If we do run into a hiccup or so along the way, bear with us, and we'll try and resolve that as we go.

The scenario that we're going to be working with, so that instead of it just being like feature by feature that we'll be covering is we're looking at it from the perspective of a civil engineering firm that's going to work on a land development project. Maybe the project was brought to them by an owner.

And this firm is right now maybe most comfortable using Civil 3D. They've heard about the [? Collection, ?] maybe know a little bit about the packages in there, but would like to see how the package could assist them in getting the project completed.

The project itself that we'll be looking at is just a small site plan. We'll be putting together a commercial-type building in a commercially zoned property. So I think it's maybe an acre or two, maybe a little bit larger than that. We've already gone in and pulled some information from the city that we can see that it's zoned correctly.

And the type of building that we're putting up is a fictitious Chicken & Waffles restaurant. And a lot of folks would say, Jeff, Jerry, your obvious commitment to physical fitness, why would you go with fast food? We thought we would go with that, be more inclusive of all people that are involved.

So the important thing to remember is this is not a real project. I have done some things before where I've had people in the audience who actually turned out to live in the same area where we were showing this, and right away were picking up the phone, hey, we got to stop this, because I don't want this by my house, and other challenges with land development. So anyway, it is a completely fictitious project, as is the restaurant.

So we will be walking through various packages of the solutions within the suite. And we're going to try in the time that we've got allotted to touch on maybe as many as 10, if not more, of the tools that are in the Collection.

As we go through, if you have any questions at all, please let us know along the way. We'll take those as we go through. If it turns out that we're starting to get a long on time, we may push those out to the end.

So time to get out of the PowerPoint, and we're going to hop into the application here. So we're going to start with Google Earth, just so I can give you a little perspective of the site itself.

So the story that we're going with or the scenario that we're using is the entrepreneur, the developer, if you will, would like to develop this property as this type of a restaurant. Knowing this, there are going to be some challenges that we'll come up with along the way, both its close proximity to a car wash that's next door. You've obviously got some residential back here that could be a challenge going through the approval process. We've even got a church and some other occupied houses and that that aren't necessarily commercially developed property as well.

Just to get one more perspective on the site itself, since we can't take a tour out there. If we look at the site, this is what it looks like. This building was built not long ago. We can see the terrain is such that it's roughly the same elevation as that, but it tapers off a little bit.

We can also see that there's a ridge out in this area, a swale. Well, swale would be a wrong term, maybe a berm. And if we come back and look at it from the top view, there's a bit of a detention area that's back there, another mound of stockpile that still remains from when this was under construction. That will be the basis of the project we'll be using moving forward.

So knowing that, assuming that we were just using Civil 3D, our ability to move forward would be limited, because we've got tools that we can go in and immediately start doing some detailed design.

But to start drawing some things together quickly, as an example from our perspective, we're going to be going into it from a concept stage first. We want to build the concept to get sign-off by the owner or the proposed developer. We also want to go into the city, and maybe have them take a look at it, and tell us whether or not they're vehemently opposed to a project like this before we invest a lot of money and move forward.

So to have a tool that's going to allow us to do that, we're going to explore InfraWorks. So I'm going to go ahead and-- well, you know what? Before I open that guy up, how many people have used InfraWorks or use InfraWorks now? Couple folks. All right. Few folks.

What we would typically do is if I want to get a model to get started with, I would go into Model Builder. I'd type in the area that I'm interested in. We'll take and find that. And then this is the area that is our project site. I'd window that. It would build a model for me, and it would pull together freely available data with roads, buildings, imagery, and we would go with that.

Now, I've already done that, which is the model that I'm currently in. So we can take a look at that model. This is what would have been produced. And as I look at it, I can see that detail. There's our a little bit of a berm. Obvious ground raised up a little bit here, maybe another stockpile or remnants of an old one back there.

I want to start making some decisions or get some idea of what we're working with here. I'd also like to know the quality of information that maybe I got from Model Builder. If I'm going to be putting together a concept, I don't want it to be way off before I get started, because my results would be way off or my decisions would be.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to quickly create what's called a parcel object within this environment. And we'll will window off the area that we're thinking about. And the reason I'm doing that is because I can start to perform a little bit of analysis on this in that if we go over to the parcel, I can take a look at some contours. So we go with 1-foot contours. I can kind of see what we wound up with.

So I'm going to flip over to a view to make that a little bit easier to see. And you see the contours moving across the site. Well, I got that from Model Builder And obviously, if I got a berm and some other things, it's not reflecting that in what I have.

Now, I could have somebody go out and survey it. But if I do that, then the city tells me they're not interested, I just spent a lot of money that I didn't need. But I'd really like to have something more accurate than this.

So we're going to explore another tool. Let's flip back to Conceptual. I'd like to explore another tool. Has anybody been in a session so far around UAV or drones, some of the technology that's available in that? We actually went out on October 31, and we flew this, just to see how that would be. And this tool-- obviously, we don't do surveying software or we don't do surveying equipment, things like that, but we leverage the data that comes out of that. But just to see what that would look like.

I'm going to minimize this guy for a moment. I'm going to share my screen here on my Galaxy tablet. And I'm going to fire up an application here. We'll go to Home. And this is the tool that I used to capture it.

It's called Pix4D. If I'm going to leverage the technology to where ReCap 360 Pro is where we're going to build this representation from the photographs, I need to take photographs that have overlap of 80% to 85%. So I need to take those pictures to be able to do it. So I need some software that's going to assist me, otherwise I'm going to be flying this drone around just clicking the button, taking pictures, and I don't know if I'm getting enough overlap to do that.

A lot of companies that are out there that do it. 3DR's got a solution. I believe they're in the exhibit hall. Pix4D's got a solution called Pix4Dcapture. For That's what I used with this.

Just to show it to you here real quick. We can come out-- this is the project site. So what it did is it creates like a lawnmower path. You send the drone up in the air. It's got GPS on it. It goes back and forth. It takes and snaps the photos for us.

If I open that, it's pretty intuitive in that I can make it bigger or smaller. And you see it'll automatically increase the number of passes that are required. I can also set the elevation at which the drone is going to fly, and it automatically determines for us the minimum amount of photographs that are required to get the overlap that we need.

So this is the tool that I leveraged. Like I said, I just wanted to show you that. Because from a practical aspect, going out and doing the collection is a bit of a mystery. Like all right, well, how do you make sure that you take the pictures in the right spots that you're going to get a good result? Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: Is it Autodesk software [INAUDIBLE]?

JERRY BARTELS: That's a great question. This is not Autodesk software. This would be something that you would leverage if you had the drone.

AUDIENCE: If you had [INAUDIBLE].

JERRY BARTELS: Well, that's a great question. The Pix4Dcapture application is free, so it'll go through and allow you to do that. And then what I did is took those images and then ran them through ReCap photo, Recap 3D-- 360 Pro to do that. Pix4D has another solution that they do it with as well.

So yeah, this isn't part of the collection. Just wanted to show you how I was able to get information into that.

So let's drop this guy down, and drop out of that. And we'll look at a folder here. So if we take a look at this folder here real quick, we have large icons. These are the photos that were captured.

So as I take and step through these, this is what the drone went through and collected for us back and forth on the site. I took and moved that information up into ReCap 360 Pro, which is part of the Collection

So I'm going to bring that up. I built a photo project. So we're going to open that up on the screen here. And I'll be able to select that, and we'll see the results of it. So my AU 2016R. We'll go ahead and just open the model.

So I used the photographs. We see those over on the side. The model itself, once that was stitched together, I used the photographs in addition to a couple of points I used on the ground to provide some control and scale. And that's what it produced.

So it's, yeah, not incredibly obvious, but you can see it's done a little bit better job now with the terrain than what I got out of Model Builder. And if I hover over one of these photographs-- oops-- I can back up here. And within this environment as well, we can kind of move around these guys, and you can see which one's in which position.

Once that was captured-- drop out of that-- I came back to InfraWorks 360, and I brought it in. Just for the sake of time here, I'll go to a Model Explorer, and I'm going to go ahead and turn on my Point Cloud. We see the Point Cloud appear. There's the new data that's been incorporated into that, that I went out and flew it. So that looks a little bit better.

And then I can extract from this immediately my Point Cloud terrain. So I'm just going to go ahead and just use the defaults. We'll start processing on that. We'll let it read the Point Cloud, and it'll automatically build a surface to represent the terrain. That terrain then will be much closer to what the existing is.

Now once again, is it survey grade? Absolutely not. I mean, I just flew it with a drone, did pictometry to stitch the images together, but at least I have something that's a lot more representative of what's actually happening out in the field. Yes, sir.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY BARTELS: Correct. When the pictures were stitched together, one of the ways that we can export it out of ReCap 360 Pro is a Point Cloud. We can export it as a 3D object or a mesh. I just brought it out as a Point Cloud. Yep.

So as I look at this now, let's go back and look at it from the view here with the contours, and I get something that's a lot more representative of what's actually out there.

So we've used InfraWorks. We've used ReCap 360 Pro.

The next thing that I want to do, I'm going to come back to my engineering view here. And what I'd like to do is start to lay out my conceptual area of what the restaurant itself is going to look like. I'd like to have some idea of where the parcel lines are. I'd also like to lay out some of the parking lot.

I've got tools that I can do that in InfraWorks 360, but they're a little crude in that I'm kind of just making rectangles for parking lots or buildings. Instead I'm going to leverage Map, which is also in the Collection, to help assist me in that.

So we'll come down here. I'm going to launch Map. And in Map, I've got the ability that I can bring in geospatial information. And at the same time, I can also leverage the tools from AutoCAD in that to start to rough out my parking lot design.

So we're going to go ahead and open a file here. I've got a concept drawing that we'll start with, and use the online Map data. So when this comes up, I should have an aerial image already in here of the area that's in question.

Now, I have shape file information of the parcel data that exists. The cool thing about that is I can immediately incorporate that into this file, and start to get some idea of the parcel lines. So we'll navigate out to my folder here. We'll come out to concept phase. We're going to do my parcels.

And a fantastic thing with a lot of the Autodesk solutions is that a lot of things are drag and drop. So I'm just going to grab the parcel shape file, drop it in here, it automatically takes itself to where it's supposed to go. So it's like what command do I need to load it and things like that. If it can live in there, most cases, we can drag and drop it.

Once the parcels go in-- I'm just going to quickly make that a little bit easier to see. I can double-click on these. Let's maybe make the outlines of the parcels, we'll go yellow. The fill, I'll maybe make that a light blue. I'll add a little transparency to that. And I get my parcel effect. So there's the parcel I'm interested in.

If that GIS information has attributes associated with it, I'm going to do Show the Data Table, and I can drill down and get access to all of the information about that parcel. So should extra information exist, I have the ability that I can start to harvest that as well. If not, the line work was what was most important to me anyway.

Because I want to use it as line work, I'm going to go ahead and check that out. And I'm going to explode that, just so that I can leverage that geometry. We'll turn these parcels off.

So that's the property line. Now, is it a surveyed property line? Absolutely not. It's GIS information. If you're a surveyor, GIS means get it surveyed. I've heard that 100 times. But anyway, it gives us some proximity of what we're working with respect to size.

The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn some layers on here that show the parking. We'll turn on some layers here. This is the parking lot that I'm going to go with. I'm going to experiment with a couple of entrances. One in, one out, and wrapping around the building.

So I've spent some time laying out more accurate geometry, get the curves in there the way that I like it. And then what I would do is I would export these back out as shape, shape data, geospatial information, to bring it back into InfraWorks.

The way I'm going to do that-- we'll just do it for one of them-- I'm going to type in the command map export. It actually exists in the menu. But like I said before, I started using the software in the late '80s, so I'm still a bit of a typist. And I find if you type, the interface never changes. You just type it in, and you're ready to go.

So map export will export a shape. We'll say Project Site. It exists. We'll overwrite that. It is a polygon shape. I'm going to select that manually. We'll grab that. We'll come down, no data. The only options that I'll change is I'm going to treat close polylines as polygons, and say OK.

I've exported the outline of the parcel. I would do the same thing with my parking lot and the island, maybe the area for the building. From there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] SDF files work better than shape files?

JERRY BARTELS: Great question. The question was around SDF files. Would I use that over shape? Absolutely. SDF files work fine. Yep. Yep. And then the SDF, I could have put them all out in one file as well. You know, shape, point, line polygon, SDF. Yep. So that works fine.

So not necessarily going to save changes to that guy. We'll come back to InfraWorks. And then like I said before, I can drag and drop all this stuff.

So we're going to go ahead and come out to my desktop here. We're going to go to my shape information. We're going to grab the island. We're going to grab the parking lot. We're going to grab the project site. I'm going to click and hold, drag those in and drop them. Now,

Once they come in, they've not been configured yet. So because they've not been configured, I can't see them. So I'll configure them individually. We see them up here at the top.

Let's start with the project site. I'm going to double-click on that. I want that to be represented as a coverage area. And I'd like that to look like, we'll say, Terrain. And we'll use Grass 2 as far as my material. We'll Close and Refresh.

Now, my yellow line, I'm going to get rid of that, because that was just a rough area I was looking at. So we'll highlight him, and we'll delete him

So this is my project site area that we're looking at. Let's take a look at the parking lot. We'll double-pick on that. It, too, will be a coverage area. I'm going to come down. That is going to be roadway. And we'll do a Surface Dark Asphalt. Close and Refresh.

I have that in there. It's underneath my grass. We'll fix that in a moment.

Last one we'll do is map the island. So we'll say, it, too, is a coverage area, and we'll apply a material to that. Now, like I mentioned before, we could go through and I could have built these things within InfraWorks, but the tools are a little more crude. And since I've got the Collection, I can go through and leverage some of the other tools to make the process of creating the outlines exactly like I want them.

So all of those are in. Let's restack them, so we can see them. I'm going to come over to my surface layers. We'll take the project site. I'll drop that to the bottom. I'll move the island up over the top of that. So we've got the site, the parking lot, and the island. We'll say OK. That's the area that I'm looking at.

Now, we notice one thing, the parking lot is draped over the top of the terrain. Probably not the way my parking lot's going to be grade. If I'm going to go in and grade it out, I'm going to want a concept that's a little bit closer to reality.

So I'm going to highlight this. And if I right-click and say Edit, I'll get a option here. I've got something else selected. I'll highlight that guy. We'll say, Shape Terrain. And if I grab the arrow, notice how it levels it out, and I can start to move that up and down into the terrain, and it'll automatically grade it for me.

So I'm going to drop it down a little bit, keep it level. It'll grade into the rest of the terrain around the outside. So I've got a nicer grading for my lot.

Last thing that I want to do is I could use a-- let's turn the clouds on. It's always happier when you have the clouds on in the background.

I want to bring in the representation of the building. It'll make a lot more sense if I can see the building. This building was created in AutoCAD.

So I'm going to come up, 2016 Project. We'll say, Concept Phase, my concept building. This is the Chicken & Waffles concept. It's an FBX file. It can live in InfraWorks, which means we can drag and drop it.

When it comes in, we'll tell it that it should be displayed as city furniture. And then I'm going to tell it interactive placing. And I can come in, and I can kind of eyeball that, and double-pick to drop it on the site.

So now I've got something that's a little bit more representative. I could continue to enhance this, but I'm going down the path that I can take this to the owner and say, well, what do you think about this with the proximity to the building? What do you think about the entrances?

We can go down to the city, and like I said, we wouldn't necessarily get a full approval, but we could maybe get a thumbs up or a thumbs down that, hey, we like where you're going, we're not morally opposed to it, before it moves into the preliminary engineering stage.

Any questions on that at all? All right. Well then, I'm going to shift gears. Jeff's going to hit the button there. He'll take us into the preliminary.

JEFF BARTELS: Perfect. OK, you can see my screen. I'm currently using Civil 3D. So we're in the preliminary engineering stage.

I'm showing the same shape file property lines that Jerry used before from the GIS data. Now, let's say that we've been told that these property lines have moved in the recent years. So we went to the county to get a recent or a current plat, and they gave us that as a TIFF image.

So I'm going to use Raster Design, which is another tool in the Collection. Let's go ahead, and we'll insert that TIFF file that they gave us. And I'm going to-- let's just step through here. And I'll drag this out and place it in the drawing.

So there's my image. The nice thing about having this plat is not only am I getting more accurate geometry, but I'm also able to see any easements. I've got a utility easement here. I've got some building setbacks. I can also see that they've called out future [? write-in ?] only access. And so now we can determine based on-- I mean, we've already kind of laid out our parking lot there. We can find out where we stand with respect to the current plat.

So I'm going to use Raster Design to align this. I'm just going to pick a couple points here for right now. We'll align this to my geometry here, keeping in mind that the GIS data is not 100% accurate. So there we go. We can see, reasonably close. We can see that some of the lot lines there have changed.

Let me do this. I'm going to type xref, and I'll bring up our proposed conditions. Let me reload this. And when I do, I can see, you know what? Our entrance, we've got one of them here very close to where they want the right-in only access. So this tells us we are going to have to have a meeting with somebody and talk about the feasibility of getting away with the lot configuration or the parking configuration we currently have.

Looks like we're not-- I mean, our utility easement's not under the building, thank goodness. And we're not encroaching on the setback at all. So with respect to the current plat, that's not too bad. Now, we will get our own surveyor to go out and do a survey of this.

When we create exhibits for meetings, it would be helpful to have some of this text. Here we have the legal description for the lot. And since this is a TIFF, it would be painful to go through and retype this.

Fortunately, we don't have to. With Raster, I can extract this text. First, I'm going to clean it up. Let me go to Clean Up here first. And I'll choose Invert. We'll invert the image.

And then I'll choose Process. And I'll say Change Color Depth. And we'll change it to bitonal. So now it's either all black or all white. And since I inverted it, it makes the black stand out.

Now that I've done that, I can do a little cleanup here. I can say Clean Up, Despeckle, and then I can pick the speckle of my choice. I'll grab-- whoops, I apologize. Let me go Despeckle, and I'll pick my area I want to Despeckle first. There we go. We'll get this much. Then I will zoom in and pick a representative speckle.

So now that I've cleaned up that area, I'm going to go through and do an optical character recognition on this. I can just define the angle that the text was written. And then I can pull this down and select the paragraph. It'll go through and extract that text. And then as I drag this down, it'll highlight things that it didn't understand. If I click on this, it'll show me the image as well. So I can go through and make evaluations on this. And I can make corrections if necessary.

I could export this as an RTF file if I wanted to move it into Word or some other word processing application. Likewise, if I just click OK here, this will convert the text into MTEXT. So this is now fully editable text that I could go through if I had to make additional adjustments. I didn't have to type it myself. So using Raster Design, I was able to do that.

Let me jump out of this drawing, and I'm going to open another one here. This one represents-- now we're working on our preliminary design. I've got the parking lot in here.

I'd like to lay out some stalls. I can use Vehicle Tracking for that. That's also in the Collection.

Let me come up here. I'll choose Vehicle Tracking. And like I said, I've got my boundary of the parking lot. I'm going to go ahead and create some parking stalls here. Let me take and drag this out to here. And I want the stalls to the inside. We'll go ahead and get this as well. And then I'll get the last one.

Anyone have to create parking lots for a living? Creating the stripes can be a really tedious process if you're doing it the old-fashioned way.

AUDIENCE: But are you able to edit [INAUDIBLE]?

JEFF BARTELS: Yes. The question was, can you edit the-- like, the parking standards meet your jurisdictional requirements? Absolutely. The way these parking stalls appear is based on a standards file. And there are just a ton of settings that you can go through. In fact, I did the same thing. I treat the standards that came in the software as a starting point, and then I went through and dialed these up to match the requirements that I needed when I used to do parking lots.

So now that I've got this in here, we'll edit a couple of these just for time here. I've got my drive aisle. It's two-way. It's 24 feet, which is going to be too much for my drive-through there. So I can take and pull this, and say it's going to be one-way, which shows me, OK, I can get away with a one-way aisle here. So since I'm going one way, I can adjust the angle of the stalls. We can go ahead and do that.

Let me do a quick edit here. I can say, let's get rid of the [? start ?] island. I really don't need that.

And then in the interest of full disclosure, my parking lot here is drawn perfectly width. So one thing, let me show you this, when I eliminated that starred island, since that is perfect width there, that last stall, it's like off by 100th, was enough to hide that last line. So I want to make sure I'm getting credit for that last stall on the end.

Now, you may be wondering, who's going to paint that? Nobody's going to paint a stripe on the curb there. There is a setting in here now-- it's actually new in the last couple releases-- where you can say do not draw the side line. So I can take that out. And I could go through, and I could tweak the stalls going around the rest of the lot that way.

The nice thing is I can quickly throw my stalls in, and then I can come up and run a report to find out how many stalls I have. In this case, I've got 45. I'd have to do a couple other adjustments there, but just for the sake of time here, we'll just stick with this side.

I'd like to add some handicapped stalls. We can do that as well. I'm going to say Edit. And we'll edit this bay. We've got several bay styles. I'm going to choose Disabled. Now that I've got one, I can select it. And I can say Copy To. And I can say copy one here, and maybe copy another one there.

As fast as I make edits to this, I can come back and hit my report and find out where I'm at.

So very quickly, we can go through and take and lay out our parking configuration for the parking lot, and make sure that we have enough space, or if we have to resize the lot to accommodate more cars.

Another thing I can do, we're going to have to have a semi-trailer come and make deliveries. So I want to make sure that we can get a WB-40 vehicle in here. So we're going to do a quick swept path analysis. That's another thing we can do with Vehicle Tracking. I'm just going to choose AutoDrive Arc here. And then I've got a WB-40 semi. Let me go ahead, and we'll drop him out in the road here. There we go. Proceed. And I'm going to turn off my running object snaps here for a second.

We'll go ahead and drive up here. Now, this parking lot is based on a real world parking lot where I live. And I was fortunate when we were out there taking some pictures to create this data set. Actually, the guy doing the delivery was actually there with the truck, which was nice. I got to see how he pulled in. So I'm going to be pulling in the same way, and actually, pulling in the exit.

Let me come in here. I'd like to pull the vehicle in parallel to the geometry. So we'll take and pull in there.

And then pick alignment. I would like to turn around the back of the lot here, parallel to this. And then we will pick alignment one more time. I'd like to come around parallel to here. And I'm watching the island in the middle there. That'll work for right now.

And then I can turn this off, and we can back up here without jackknifing. We'll take and get that in. That'll do for right now.

So he actually pulled in and blocked that area of the drive-through, but it let the other cars go around where they could place their order. This is the storage unit that he was delivering to.

So now that I've backed up, and of course, now that I've moved that off. Hold on. Let me take and pull that back. There we go. Let's pull this back out again.

And that is unfortunate. The story of my life. Now that we're doing a recording, it's not letting me pull out.

OK, then what this is, this is like Iron Chef. I just took the Baked Alaska out of the oven, and I just dropped it on the floor. Now it's covered with cat hair. So rather than watching me pick the cat hair off the Baked Alaska, I'm going to take and open up the other one that I have here, where I did pull out. So you don't have to watch me sweat, and try and fix that in front of your eyes.

So here's my swept path analysis. I've pulled in. I've backed up. And so now I've validated that that vehicle can get in and out, and service the lot.

At this point, I would go through and take care of some of the grading. I would create feature lines from the curb and gutter, and set those to an elevation. I could build a surface from that. That's actually what I have here. If I select this, I can go to my object viewer, and I can tip this up. You can see, there's my parking lot's been graded.

So once I have my rough grading, I can also go through with vehicle tracking. I can ensure that not only can the vehicle get in here from a horizontal perspective, but am I going to have any difficulties from a vertical perspective?

If I select the path here and go to Vehicle Tracking, I can project this path. If I go to Surfaces here, I can project this up to my top surface. I've got a surface in here called composite that represents my proposed. So that's all I've done there.

Now that I've done that, I can select a path, and I can click Animate. And we can actually watch the vehicle drive in 3D. We'll take and speed this up a little bit. And I've got some nice camera controls here, where I can get a good look. But you can see when he pulls in, you can see the vehicle is actually driving on the surface. That's one of the nice things about Vehicle Tracking is it is incorporated into Civil 3D, so it does recognize the Civil 3D objects.

Let's get above this, so we can see the vehicle coming around. And you can save these videos, so that if you did have to go to a public meeting, you can show any type of vehicle that's got to get in there and service it, not only can we give you a printed exhibit, but I can give you an animation, too, that shows you that it works.

So let's bump this up even a little faster. We're backing up. A little faster. Breaking the law now. Now he's pulling back out into the main traffic.

So using Vehicle Tracking, I was able to create my stalls and my swept path analysis, both horizontal and vertical.

And just real quick. Now, we don't have a lot of issues with the grading here as far as steep grades or anything. But if I do select the path, I can come up and have it generate sections where it'll look and identify places where I'm getting close to the ground. Let's see if we can see a measurement here. Like I said, 1.29 feet.

I know that I don't have any issues, because it would actually create colorized lines showing me the green, yellow, orange, magenta, red, depending on if I'm approaching the ground or penetrating the ground.

Let's do one more thing. If I select the vehicle, I can bring up a quick profile here. So this is the profile for that vehicle. And you can see the minimum ground clearance is 1.334 feet. So I got within 1.2 feet. So I did approach the ground a little bit, but nowhere close to where it was going to be a problem.

AUDIENCE: How do you turn off [INAUDIBLE]?

JEFF BARTELS: Oh, question was, yeah, how do you take and turn off the number one nodes? We have to adjust the-- it's called a-- let me select this, and I'll go to the-- it's called a Report Wizard. Probably not the best name for it. It should be called Style Wizard. That's what controls the appearance of what these things look like. And when that comes up, you got to step through. There's a control for everything.

And one of these is going to have to do with construction, construction lines, construction objects, all the little accouterments. But that's where you'd go through and whichever one it happens to be.

And another thing. We'll give our email addresses at the end of the session. I've done a ton of recordings that go through and explain just that, how to go through and create your own parking standards-- somebody asked about that-- and how to create your own styles for the driving paths. So I'm more than willing to share those.

So got the preliminary. At this point, we're getting ready to move things back over to InfraWorks. We'd be creating shape files from the surface boundary and the parking lot boundary to move that over.

I want to do one more thing. When we get the stuff over to InfraWorks, one of the best ways to add realism to a model is to add all of the little accouterments, building-- I'm sorry-- trees and people and cars.

And if you have a fast food restaurant, you're going to have things that are specific to that, menu boards, the sign out in front, things like that. You may think, well, if I've got to create something like that, maybe I've got to get SketchUp or some other application. You can actually do it in AutoCAD. It's very easy. AutoCAD's part of the collection. AutoCAD's incorporated into several of these tools as well.

But let me show you real quick. I'm going to build a menu board here for the restaurant. I'm just going to pull up AutoCAD. And the board that I'm going to create is going to be the weekly specials. So it's not going to be the whole board. It's going to be the board that you see while you're sitting waiting for the next guy to finish ordering. It's going to be a small board.

So let me open this up quick. I've just got some geometry here. Let me click my Southeast hot spot to go to a 3D view on this. I'm also going to go through and click the gear in the corner, and I'll make sure that I'm viewing the 3D Modeling workspace.