IMAGINiT Civil Solutions Blog

What’s New in Infraworks 360 - Part 3

Jay Meszar | Solutions Consultant

Hello again from the wonderful world of Infraworks 360!  This installment of What’s New in Infraworks 360 will cover the new commands that permit users to display profiles, cross sections and superelevations. 

Viewing a profile is not necessarily a new feature in Infraworks 360, but it fits well with the other features, so I thought it would be good to cover the subject here. When a roadway is sketched out, Infraworks 360 will essentially place the new roadway as close to the existing surface as it can.  This is often acceptable to many people because they aren’t sure where the final design will appear in the early stages of development.  Others will need to adjust the profile to meet their desired design.  If you have been doing this and grip editing the roadway in plan view, you have been missing a very useful feature Infraworks 360 has to offer.  There are two ways to view a profile view.  The first requires you to select the roadway and right-click, then choose SHOW IN PROFILE VIEW. 

Select the PROFILE VIEW button, and then the roadway

The profile can now be adjusted using the grips in plan view OR the grips in the profile view.

Now, on to cross sections.  Before this release, it was difficult to see what the slope of the road was.  The new cross section command makes that very easy.  First, select the road, right-click and select SHOW CROSS SECTION VIEW.  A new window will appear showing the cross section of the road.  The only question you might have is, “how do I know where the section I am viewing is located?”  The answer is a simple one.  You can see in the image below there is a station listed in the top right corner that reads “18+75.00”.  If this is the first time you are using these features, you might not understand that there are several ways to change the station. 

First and probably the easiest way to get the station you would like to see, is to simply select the station number and manually type in the station you would like to see (keep in mind that each road begins at station 0+00).  Another method of changing stations is to click the + or – signs to the right of the station number.  Using this method will either increase or decrease the distance along the alignment by 25’ respectively.  Lastly, we can use the up and down arrows to move to the next critical superelevation station along the alignment.  The critical sections available are listed below.

Cross section views offer more than just a view of the section at a critical station.  The view itself can be changed to view different aspects of the road and provide more information.  For example: Select one of the radial buttons in the lower right corner and the view will change to show a line diagram of the top of the section.  Select another and the view changes to view the top and depth of the section (Currently without customization the depth can’t be changed.).  The last button shows the cut and fill area required to build this section.  The area is shaded red to show cut areas and green for fill areas.  There is also an aspect ratio setting that allows you to change the vertical exaggeration within the view.

Superelevation was mentioned above so let’s look at how Infraworks 360 handles superelevations.  The tricky part can be just figuring out where the command is.  Select the road, right-click and select in the box next to Show Superelevation. 

If you don’t see the yellow and red shaded areas around each curve, you may need to turn on superelevation for that roadway.  To accomplish this, see the roadways asset card and click the switch next to Superelevation (see the red arrow in the image below).

My initial thought when seeing this was, great but I bet I have no control over what the superelevation rate is.  Well, I was wrong.  Using the asset card available when the road is selected, users have control of not only the Max Superelevation Rate but also the Runoff on Spiral.  Once again, Autodesk has impressed this user with the available design input for a tool that hasn’t been given much credibility in the past.

If you have been following this blog for the past few weeks, you can see there are a number of new tools available to Infraworks 360 users.  These tools have taken Infraworks 360 from what many believed to be a “napkin sketch” software to a legitimate preliminary design tool.

Infraworks 360 Release 2017.2 – Overview Part 2

Jay Meszar | Solutions Consultant

During last week’s edition I wrote about some of the new features in Infraworks 360.  We looked at the new Views feature and the how Component Roads play a bigger part in the new tools Infraworks 360 has to offer.  I am going to continue writing about the new features for the next couple of weeks.  In this entry, I would like to continue with Component Roads and some of the new tools that go along with them.  Additionally, new functionality has been included in the bridge and drainage tools.

Let’s start where we left off with the last entry.  Component Roads now offer many new features such as the ability to quickly turn on and off Lane Markings.  Simply selecting the road and viewing the Road Asset Card gives us the ability to select a switch that turns on and off the lane markings for the Component Road.  As you can see, a dashed pavement marking has been added to the centerline of the roadway.  Autodesk has done a pretty good job of making tasks like this very easy to accomplish. 

 

There are some new features that may not be as obvious or as easy to find if you haven’t been told where they are.  For instance, after selecting a Component Road a right mouse click provides a variety of tools that are not only useful for visualization purposes but also for conveying design intent.  One of these features is the Roadside Grading checkbox.  Looking at this seems to only add the topic of grading to the asset card.  However, by adding this topic we are able to adjust the grading material.  Notice in the images below on the left the images shows only the raster draped to the 3:1 slope for the roadside grading.  In the image on the left we see that a material has been assigned to the slope.

This functionality has been around for a little while and not something brand new.  However, being able to select either the left or right sides to change them individually is new.  By selecting the road and selecting the side of the road you would like to change, a blue outline will cover that side.  You can then use the Asset Card to change the material type.

While this is more of a visualization tool and not a design tool like I mentioned earlier, by getting to this point, we can see the other options available for the individual sides.  By selecting the specific side, we can not only change the material but we can also change the slope for cut and fill for each side.  We can show the left side fill slope at a 3:1 while showing the left cut slope at 2:1. The right can then be shown with a fill slope of 4:1 and a cut of 3:1.  Of course, we are not provided the functionality to manually change slopes across a station range, that isn’t what Infraworks 360 is meant to do.  When we are trying to accomplish a very detailed design, we should be using AutoCAD Civil 3D to accomplish it. 

Structural engineering was not left out in this version of Infraworks 360.  Additional bridge components have been added to this version that I think many engineers will find useful.  The image below shows we now can turn on and off the different components of the bridge to better analyze the design.

Bridges in Infraworks 360 are no longer just a pretty picture.  An analysis can be run on each girder as shown below.  If for any reason a girder does not meet design requirements, individual dimensions can be changed to help meet these requirements.  Notice in the second image how the Depth of the beam was changed.

It is now possible to calculate quantities need to create a bridge design. Selecting the Quantities button provides a Quantities Asset Card showing information on the concrete and steel quantities for Bridge, Superstructure, Substructure and also shows the quantities for the selected part of the bridge.

In addition to all of this, bridges are much like component roads in that they are customizable and are “intelligent” enough to match the style being used for the preceding component road.  Should a bridge be proposed along a curve, the bridge will be superelevated and be able to be displayed in cross section view.

Drainage Networks have also been given a slight but all important upgrade in this latest version of Infraworks 360.  Each network can now be placed on a roadway simply by selecting the road, right-clicking and adding a drainage network.  This has been the case for a while now but something that is new is the design capabilities out of the box.  The software understands when the road changes grade in the pavement and accounts for this change when placing the drainage.  In the image below, notice the catch basins in normal crown are on both sides of the road but when the road enters superelevation, the structures are placed on the low side of the super to account for the water flow at the bottom.  There is not a basin on the high side.

In the next installment of What’s New in Infraworks 360 we will be discussing more features that have been added to this release.  Specifically, we will be discussing the ability to view profiles, cross sections and superelevation to roadways.

Infraworks 360 Release 2017.2 – Overview Part 1

Jay Meszar | Solutions Consultant

Recently, Autodesk released Infraworks 360 2017.2 to the public.  If you are like me, you probably thought to yourself, what features are in this version that I am not going to use very often?  You may have thought that until you installed the software and started trying out the new tools and then your thoughts quickly switched to holy smokes this is awesome!!

What has Autodesk done that makes me think users will embrace Infraworks 360 as part of their project workflows now?  Well for starters, a Views tab has been added to the interface where we can remove all the fancy visualization stuff like clouds, moving water etc., and look at what engineers are interested in the most, their project.  These new Views are customizable and new Views can be created and saved to show the model features needed to convey the design intent.  Below are three images showing the two Views installed with the software and one customized view.

Conceptual View (Installed with software)

Engineering View (Installed with software)

Custom View (Not installed)

As you can see, I was able to customize the model to appear three different ways.  From a conceptual visualization to a customized view most engineers are used to seeing with a wireframe surface model.  These views are easy to create and easy to switch from one to the other.  Imagine trying to use another software to provide these three views in this short a timeframe.  I would argue, It simply can’t be done.

The next feature I would like to discuss isn’t new to Infraworks 360 but has been significantly enhanced in this release.  A couple of releases back, Component Roads were introduced to the software.  The idea behind these features is that many users would be able to relate to a Component Road because they are in some ways similar to an AutoCAD Civil 3D Assembly.  For example: A component road can start with something as simple as one lane and be built onto from there.  Or, a complete assembly can be placed as the road centerline geometry is being created.  A lane transition is as easy as a right-click to add a lane and then specify a station to start and a station to end the transition. 

Completed Component Road with 1 Lane

These are just a few of the new features available in Infraworks 360 2017.2.  In next week’s blog we will look at more features currently available. Some of those features include Roadside Grading, Right of Way, Parcels and more.