Data sources - InfraWorks Tutorial

- [Narrator] Previously with our model, we looked at how we use Model Builder to really give us a good base to work from. What is the existing conditions of the world or model that we're going to be looking at? But there are times that we're going to want to supplement that data, or maybe build our model from scratch, with the data that's provided or available to us. So let's go ahead and start. We're going to open up, by going and clicking open model. And going to our Desktop and Exercise Files locations, under chapter three, and go to chapter three SQL files. That's of course our InfraWorks model. I'm going to go ahead and collapse this category. And if I come to the proposals, you'll see there's master, but there's a few other proposals as well. Let me go ahead and select the DataSources proposal. And when I do, you'll see it looks a little bit different from what we were looking at in our master proposal. And that's because we don't have all of the base existing information for this model showing up in this proposal. We're going to add this information manually. That's the exercise, and that's why we have this proposal setup just for this exercise. Now what we're going to do, is we're going to accomplish this by opening up our build, manage, and analyze category, and we have our flyout toolbar. And we're going to choose the very first subsection to create and manage your model. When we do that, we have all the functions available, and choose data sources, which will open up the data sources panel. Now you'll see some of the data source available already. We have the terrain. And you can see that by the little bumps and pits that we have displayed in that tan-ish background. And then we have imagery, but the imagery's not showing up. This is the challenge when we're actually taking advantage of a model that's been built by one individual, and being shared using local means. That's the power of BIM 360 to share the models instead. But since we're working with the exercises in LinkedIn, some of these proposals may not have the imagery refreshed or linked. The imagery is being fed from Bing Maps, so we're just going to kind of refresh that. I'm going to select imagery here. And we're going to just choose to refresh the data source, and it's going to come back in and load the imagery from Bing Maps onto this proposal. But we may have to do this again on other proposals as well. And we just select that in our data source section, under ground imagery, and choose to refresh. And now we have our imagery. Now, there are many different types of files that we can use for source data. In our data sources, I can choose to drop down here, and this is all the different types of files that we can use as a means to import data into our model. We can use 3D Model, which would be like an fpx file, or other model file types. We can take our AutoCAD Civil 3D drawing, and we can bring it right in, and it will read certain Civil 3D objects, and we can use that. AutoCAD drawings as well. AutoCAD drawings just as a 2D overlay, kind of like a spray paint onto our aerial, and our model. We can use Revit models. CityGML's. DGN files. IFC files, LandXML, Point Clouds, which we'll look at later. Raster, Spatial Data Files, Autodesk's means of having GIS files. Shape files, which are mainly esri types. GIS files, SQLite, and so on. Even SketchUp. Now you'll notice, there's different icons on the left side. If you see that little cloud icon, what that means is to use that ability, to bring in that data type, you'll need to make sure you're logged into your Autodesk 360 subscription, within InfraWorks. Over here you'll see that I'm logged in. You can not only just bring in file types, but you can connect to a server location, where you'll have your GIS server, or something where all of your database information could be stored as well. We can add our information one data source at a time, but what we're going to do is, this is our exercise files. If I go into chapter three of our exercise files, you'll notice data source files as a subdirectory in there. If I double click in there, you have a lot of different files. And if I sort them by type, you'll notice that you have the shape files listed right here, and then a lot of other support files, that the shape files really need to properly display the information. So we're going to select all of the shape files. And you can see that I used the Windows-Control to select five shape files. And I'm just going to grab them, and we're going to drag and then drop them into our model. When we do that, it immediately pops open, and expects us to configure. Well since the files that we brought in are different types of data, they're not all buildings, they're not all roads, I'm going to cancel this, and individually configure the imported data. As we've been running into, my graphics display is a little bit small in resolution, so I'm going to slide this over, but all I did was just hit the cancel button. Make sure you hit the cancel button. And we're going to individually configure the imported data. We're going to start with the bfootprints data that we have imported. I'm going to select this, right click, and choose to configure this data. It's going to open up and immediately the first thing we want to do is establish what kind of data it is. It's a building data type, as you can tell by the name. Now as soon as we establish data type, it will then open up a whole different array of options for configuring the information based upon that data type. One is, we can establish a name. In all of these different things, we can feed off of from the information found in the shape file. So think of the shape file like a data table, and reading the different columns, or fields of those data tables, we can link the information within InfraWorks. We're going to set a roof height, a standard roof height of something like 16 feet. But again we could connect that to the data, if we had any data, but you notice we don't have height, roof height connected to the shape file. It's not displayed. How are these buildings going to look? And we're just going to say, colorize them using a random facade on the building, as well as the roof material. The geo location, it's reading and saying, based upon the shape file, the coordinate system is the Georgia 83 West Foot. If you remember, when we were establishing our application options, those were the values that we had set for our UCS. So it was able to bring it in, and translate immediately. We probably don't want to bring in the entire county, as the shape file contains the entire county. So I'm going to check this box, and say clip just to the model extents. And remember, that was part of our model properties. And so we're going to choose clip to model extents. And say to drape the buildings over the terrain model. And so the building locations are going to be draped onto the terrain model. Now some of these buildings are quite large. Large warehouses. The terrain model may have different elevations, maybe even before the buildings were there. But it's going to do its best, based upon the central location of the finished floor, or the building shape, it will place the building there. Now another thing we could do is connect it to a specific elevation, if that information, such as the finished floor elevation, was found in our data table. But we don't. So we're just going to drape it onto the terrain. Now what we're going to do is just kind of walk through. There's a few other things here we can link, and setup the tooltips. Have a table, and it reads out the information from that GIS, as well as the InfraWorks model properties. And a few other settings that we can have available to us as well. Some of these are pretty generic, meaning that they're across all data types. Others are specific to the data type, such as roof height, and roof slope. So, as I've had to do in the past, I'm going to slide this off, but I'm choosing the OK button. And it doesn't show any change. So another option you can choose, is close and refresh. And that would be okay, as well as refresh, and placing those buildings on and refreshing your model. So you now see those buildings show up on our model in InfraWorks. I'm going to go ahead and close this down so we can see our graphic space a little bit better. Let's go through, and we're going to make and configure each one of these, one at a time. So I'm going to expand this out, so we can see this a little bit better. We'll start with the roads. So I'm going to double click this time. If you double click, or right click and choose configure, either way, you'll get to the data configuration options. Here we're going to choose roads. When we do, it provides different values than what we had with the buildings. Now, we can again try to read information from the data table. This data table, within the shape file, has a lot more information. So what we're going to do, is we're going to link the name value to one of the values here. So we're going to scroll on down. And notice there is a name in our data table. So we're going to link the name of the InfraWorks road object, to the name found in the shape file. Some other values of course you can set. We've already covered all of these. These are the generic ones that are going to show up with each type of data that we have. But we're going to come back to source, and as we've done in the past, clip and drape. And then I'm going to choose close and refresh this time. And you see our roads come in. And drape onto the terrain. And if I pick on any one of these roads, the asset card will open up. And notice in the asset card, the name of the road will show up. In this case, Highway 129. I select another one, it's the John B. Brooks Road. And so we've now linked that data together, using the data source configurations. Let's go ahead and complete the rest of the information we have. And we'll just work through the three that have not been configured, starting with hydrants. The hydrants are what you would consider, or call in this case, city furniture. City furniture are individual features, placed throughout the model. And we're going to set the information to be only clipped. The model extents to be draped here. And then I'm going to come back to common, and we're going to set the style. And so I'm going to click on this little pencil. And we're going to choose from the categories that are available for all of the 3D model objects. Choose 3D model city furniture. And then from the city furniture, choose fire hydrant. And we're going to choose a red fire hydrant, to see if it'll stand out a little bit more. Click OK. We'll come over here, choose close and refresh. And these are fire hydrants spread throughout our model. Very large model, and so they may be hard to see, but we're going to see if we can find one here. Let me pan, there we go. Saw one as I was panning back. Just missed it, there we go. So, we have a fire hydrant right there. City furniture, style, and so forth. A few more. We're going to do streams and rivers. And for our streams and rivers, we're going to bring them in. We're going to set them for a data type to being streams. Now the big difference between water areas, as you see listed below, and streams, streams are expecting more of a linear path. Whereas water areas are expecting more like a lake. A closed polygonal space. So we're going to set the data type to being streams. I don't believe there's a name here, but let's scroll through and see. Well we do have one. Let's set it. And the only other two things, clip to model extent, and drape. Pull this back over. We're going to choose close and refresh. It's going to refresh our model. And now you see the different streams going throughout our model here now. One more thing to configure, and that's our parcels. And so, we're going to come over here and double click on jackson_parcels. And we're going to choose the correct data type for our parcels. Now, there's a few different ones we could use. You could choose of course parcels, to establish or configure as a data type. And these are parcels. But coverage areas, as well as other settings, we could even use water areas, depending on how we wanted it to look, and the different values we wanted to assign to it. Could be used as well. Let's go ahead and set parcels. And for a rule style, we're going to come over here, and I'm just going to choose the pencil. And I want to make sure we clearly can see it, so we're going to choose nice thick yellow line. Click OK. And come over to the name. Now name here, we're going to choose a unique ID for that parcel. So if I scroll on down, a unique ID for that parcel would be the parcel ID number. And so that's what we're going to set here, is the parcel number. But there's other values you could set. A zoning, or the owner, depending on the information that's available in the table. For the description, let's go ahead and link it to zoning. And then we can use that for our themes down the road. So I'm going to set that to zoning. We're going to have a thick yellow line here. And then we're going to come to our source. Clip to model extent. Convert closed polylines to polygons. Not an issue with GIS information, but a good, normal best practice, especially when we're bringing in AutoCAD information. And we're going to drape the parcels onto the terrain. I'm going to come and bring this over to geo location. We're going to check and make sure that's good. Now one thing we didn't look at, is this is grayed out, but let's say we didn't have a coordinate system assigned. A lot of 3D models, FBX files, they're not going to have coordinate systems assigned to those files when we bring them in. And so we can choose the interactive placing, and we can line it up and place it interactively, or graphically you could say, on our model. I'm going to pull this over, and we're going to choose close and refresh. Now because of the information found within, this one's going to take a little bit longer than all of the other data that we brought in for our model. Now once we have that though, there's some pretty neat features that are unique to parcel objects. So let me close down our data sources. We have everything now setup in our data sources. And I'm going to select this model, or this parcel here. Now you just pick one of the yellow lines, and you'll see that it's outlined here. And in my asset card for that parcel, it's able to read the terrain there, and we can choose to display the contours for the terrain at a two foot interval, just for that parcel. So it gives me a nice visual. Something that we're used to seeing, which are those contour lines. And it'll be displayed on that parcel, giving us a little bit better grasp of maybe the drainage pattern. A place of how to design and place the building on the high point of the property, which you visually may be able to see, but also having those contours gives us a good control. I'm going to turn off that display. Pick anywhere outside of the parcel to deselect that parcel. And we've set that style to yellow. Now let's talk a little bit about this imagery. The imagery is a bit rough. We did refresh it, but it's still not maybe to the level of detail that we'd like. Let me go and turn the data sources back on, and come back to ground imagery. Choose imagery, and we're going to configure this. I'm going to double click on this. What you see here, we have a lot less configuration options with the Raster ground imagery type of data. If I come to the Raster tab though, you'll notice down here for the Bing maps, there's a resolution control, and the higher the number here, or the closer to the ground that you have that resolution, the more accurate the surface is going to be, or the aerial is going to be. And so let's go ahead and change that. We're going to change it just to 18. And of course, it depends on the accuracy, or how good the aerial image is to begin with. I'm going to click close and refresh. And this will take a second. It's actually going to the Bing servers. It's gathering and getting the imagery, the latest imagery at the highest resolution that we have it set to, at this 18. Of course you saw that we could go even higher. And the imagery will now be a little bit more accurate. It won't have as much fuzziness once it refreshes here. And it will be draped on the terrain. The aerial image is actually draped onto the terrain. So as that's working, let's just summarize. We've brought in the building footprints, fire hydrants, parcels, roads, streams, and rivers. All of this in the different parcel shape files. And we also then configured each one of them. So we can start with Model Builder. It'll save us a lot of time getting started and then we can supplement the Model Builder data with our own data source. You see now how much more accurate just bumping it up one number, from 17 to 18, has accomplished with our imagery. Now we can bump it up a little bit more, and get even more accurate aerial images if we want. Or, we can bring in our own images, and replace the Bing images if we so desire. So, we better understand how to manage our data, not just using Model Builder. It's a great way to get it started. But also if we have our own data sources to supplement or build our own existing model, to accurately begin creating our design, and that's what we're going to do in our next video.