Trevor English
Youssef Al Fahham
As more and more of the world’s infrastructure is built, the need for efficient and compliant drainage designs only grows. Properly managing site drainage and coordinating this plan with your overall site design is a challenge engineers and drainage designers know well.
Our team of drainage experts and product developers have made it their mission to solve this industry challenge through expanding integrations between InfoDrainage, Autodesk’s drainage design solution, and Civil 3D, the world’s foremost civil design software.
As Autodesk continues pursuit of delivering the most powerful, accessible, and easy-to-use drainage design software, there are many existing integrations between the two platforms that deserve mentioning. Let’s explore how InfoDrainage and Civil 3D are integrated today, and how this integration plans to evolve to address the needs of tomorrow.
How do InfoDrainage and Civil 3D currently work together?
As an industry first, InfoDrainage recently added Results Migration with Civil 3D, meaning that users can directly migrate their physical InfoDrainage models and associated hydraulic results into their Civil 3D models. You have long been able to directly import your physical drainage models from InfoDrainage into Civil 3D, but with the ability to connect the actual hydraulic results, you can now achieve a highly intricate level of data interoperability with a more automated workflow.
In site design, juggling the plethora of constraints and inputs for a given project can be challenging to say the least. Working to build sustainable and efficient designs means listening to the results of your hydraulic model first and then reinforcing your design accordingly. By capitalizing on the direct results migration between InfoDrainage and Civil 3D that we recently added, users can now enrich their projects with more context and analysis from their drainage model results.
For a more specific example, say you’re designing a highway’s drainage system. With the results migration between InfoDrainage and Civil 3D, you can skillfully incorporate both hydraulic grade lines and energy grade lines from InfoDrainage along your Civil 3D plot sections, giving you a comprehensive look at your drainage system’s behavior, all inside of your civil design solution. Ultimately, this means you can more efficiently analyze, design, and modify essential drainage infrastructure throughout the project planning and design phases.
Interoperability: roundtripping for convenience and collaboration
Backing up to a higher level look at how these leading solutions are integrated, users are able to directly connect InfoDrainage and Civil 3D through the InfoDrainage for Civil 3D toolbar inside of Civil 3D. This toolbar is the bedrock that allows engineers to actively exchange physical model attributes and hydraulic results between InfoDrainage and Civil 3D.
The results migration component of InfoDrainage provides even greater advancements in the connectivity of drainage design and site design solutions. Users can not only bring over physical drainage networks and hydraulic results from InfoDrainage into Civil 3D, but they can also push data the other way. A drainage network laid inside of Civil 3D can be exported into InfoDrainage for analysis and more granular design work with the click of a button in the toolbar. Users can then make the appropriate design changes in InfoDrainage, like pipe slope and sizing, inlet placement, among other things, and push this updated design back into Civil 3D to see how it fits with the rest of the site.
For a close look at how InfoDrainage can help streamline your drainage design workflows, one of our Solutions Engineers, Midori Patterson, takes a closer look in the Water Drop workflow video below. If you’re ready to install InfoDrainage for Civil 3D on this support page.
Looking ahead at future integration opportunities
Development and improvement continue in both of these solutions, which means the infrastructure connecting InfoDrainage and Civil 3D is growing stronger. Over the next many development cycles, users will see increased efficiencies and new functionalities that enable even better collaboration between their civil design and drainage design solutions.
If you’d like to stay on top of these developments, our team compiles many helpful resources to keep you in the know:
- The Autodesk Water Roadmap outlines completed, in development, and in consideration features for all of our water software and is updated regularly.
- We publish updates on our products for every development cycle on the One Water Blog. The blog has an RSS feed if that’s how you prefer to consume news.
- We have a YouTube playlist that includes the latest on InfoDrainage such as product update videos and new Water Drop worfklow videos that feature InfoDrainage.
- The InfoDrainage Technical Hub has everything you need to go deeper with the product. You can sign up for technical notifications via email if you wish.
- If you’d like to see improvements made to feature sets or workflows: we’re listening! We’ve built the Autodesk Water feedback portal where we encourage you to submit ideas, which often get put into development for new releases.
Not an InfoDrainage user? Try it for free.
- If you’re already a Civil 3D user, take advantage of our 30-free trial of InfoDrainage and see how this integration works. If you’re not sure about the difference between InfoDrainage Standard vs Ultimate, you’ll be happy to learn that the trial includes all features of InfoDrainage Ultimate.
- If you’re a Civil 3D user who uses Autodesk’s Storm and Sanitary Analysis (SSA) for Civil 3D or a legacy Microdrainage user – or just someone who regularly needs to exchange files with other designers – we encourage you to compare how your existing processes work with InfoDrainage as part of your workflow.
- Got a question? You can send us a message, and we’ll help you understand all of the implications of your workflows and how they can be improved.