Analyzing visibility

- One of the simplest yet most powerful questions you can answer using InfraWorks 360 is can I see it from there? Let's take a look at how this is done. I've chosen the proposal called Analysis. And I'm going to choose a bookmark called Rincon Pt. to LH. This is a bookmark which allows me to look from Rincon Point up to our development, Lynda Heights Up on the Hilltop. Now something else I want you to do before performing this analysis is I want you to go into Settings and Utilities, click the Application Options icon, go to 3D Graphics, and go ahead and crank up your Display Detail the whole way to High.

The reason for this is if you have this setting too low the homes, the light poles, things in your model up here on the hilltop may actually disappear when you're this far away from those objects. So we don't want that to happen because we're analyzing for visibility. Okay, so back to the question at hand. Let's say again we're in a public meeting and we're showing our model, and the folks in the meeting want to know if this development can be seen from this very popular tourist attraction Rincon Point where surfers come from all over the country to ride the waves here.

Well, at this distance it's kind of hard to tell. It looks like maybe I can see some light poles jutting up into the skyline, but I'm not quite sure whether I can see the homes. And I really want to get a definitive answer as to whether I can see the rooftops from this location. So what I can do is in my Analysis tools and the way that I get to those is to open the Core tools, click the Analyze icon. You'll see an icon in here called Select Visible. It's very easy to use.

All I do is position my view in the direction that I want to look and put myself in the location that I want to look from and click the Select Visible button. And InfraWorks 360 will select any object in the model that I can see from this location. So you can see right off the bat, it's selected the water feature over on the right. It selected some roads. But what I'm really interested in is what's going on in my development. So with everything still selected, I can make my way up there and it's very interesting to see that the only thing that's selected is the road remembering that these lamp posts are actually part of the road.

They're part of the road style. So I'm pretty sure what's happening here is since I can see those obviously from that Rincon Point location, InfraWorks is telling me that that's visible. Notice that none of the homes except for this one solitary home from up here on the top is visible from Rincon Point. So that may be a concern in one direction or the other. Maybe the community doesn't want the homes to be able to see that location or vice versa, they don't want to spoil the pristine feel of that location by being able to look on the hilltop and see this development.

Whatever the case, understanding whether or not you can see a certain object from a certain location in the model is quite often very important. I mean think about it. If you're developing part of the land one of the things that people are going to want to really know about is where can I see that development from. So there you have it. If someone asks if they can see a certain feature of your design from a specific location you can answer it using your InfraWorks model.