From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

InfraWorks 360 Home: Working with tiles - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

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InfraWorks 360 Home: Working with tiles

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- [Voiceover] They say there's no place like home, and InfraWorks 360 home is where you'll start each InfraWorks 360 session. Let's take a look at one of the most important parts of InfraWorks 360 home: the tiles that represent your models. These large pictures are actual tiles representing models that you have access to and these models actually exist, in what I'll break down as three different states. This first model here you see called Kansas City is a cloud model, I know that by the cloud icon in the lower right corner and the icons that I see in this area. These give me some clues as to the state of this model. But another key piece of information happens when I hover over this cloud and I look at the tool tip and you can see that this is a cloud model that's been cached, it even tells me the location where the files have been cached. So what this means is that this model lives in the cloud, but I've opened it on this computer and the files that it needs have been downloaded and cached to my local hard drive. The model to the right of that is also a cloud model, but you'll notice it just says cloud model, it doesn't say anything about being cached and that means I either have never opened this file, which is most likely, and a very small chance that maybe I've opened the model at one point in the future and deleted the cached files, but that takes kinda an advanced level of knowledge to know where those files are and go in and change them and I wouldn't recommend doing that. Nine times out of 10, or even a greater frequency than that, when you see this icon and it just says cloud model on the tool tip, it's a model that strictly lives in the cloud as far as you're concerned, it's never been opened locally. There's a third state and if I scroll down a bit, you'll see some models that have this house icon and these are models that never lived in the cloud. These models only exist locally and you can see on the tool tip, it's referred to as a local model and it tells me the path where it's stored. Now the reason that these models, in this case, are listed as local is because I downloaded the data from the Lynda.com site and copied that data to my hard drive and opened them right there. That's not the most natural way to start a model. Models are usually born in the cloud, but it's not the only way, obviously, as we see with these files here. Some other things going on with the tiles, you'll notice they all have an open icon, if I hover over that it'll say open model regardless of the state. Now if a model lives in the cloud, and I click open, it'll have to go through a process of downloading the files that it needs to enable you to open the model, because most of what you do, even though InfraWorks 360 is a cloud based product, most of what you do actually happens locally on the desktop and that's a good thing because it really helps with performance. The models that you open in InfraWorks 360 are very robust, graphically there's a lot going on visually, so it helps if that's processed on the hard drive locally. But you'll notice that regardless of the state, I have this open icon or open model icon. Now for the locally stored models, I have some additional capabilities. So if I...see here I've got the open model icon but I've also got a duplicate model icon and I can also delete the model, so some more stuff going on here. I can also see if the model's been cached locally, the size of the model, and if it's a model that is, at all, associated with the cloud. When I hover over it I'll see the name of the model, who last opened it, the group that it lives in, and we'll talk about groups later on, and also the owner of that group or the author of the model is the best way to put it. Here we see the same information: who last saved it, what group it's in, and the person who authored it. If I scroll down to this one, you'll see that there's no group information associated with it because it's strictly a locally stored model. Let's look at some other things that we can do with these model tiles. If we look in this area here, we'll see that we have a toolbar that we can expand and contract, going to expand that just to show you what you may be seeing on your screen, but because I'm working with unlimited amount of screen space, I've gone ahead and contracted that toolbar so that we can see this toolbar. This is what we're interested in right now and these are ways that I can sort the tiles on my screen. I can sort them by date, my name, by the group that they are stored in, or by the author. I can also expand and contract this toolbar as well, that's this button here. What I find though, the tool that I use most often is this search area. If I'm looking for a specific model with a certain name or by a certain author, I can type in a value in this search. It's more of a filter than a search. I'll type in the word Lynda, and now it will limit all of the tiles on my screen to those that contain the word Lynda and you can do that for any key word that, again, would exist in the title, or the group name, or the author. It looks in a bunch of different areas for the models. So there's searching capability, there's sorting capability, because after a while of using the software, you're going to get a large number of tiles on this InfraWorks 360 home screen and you're gonna need to kinda whittle that down to something a little more manageable and those are the tools you have at your disposal. So that takes care of understanding the tiles that you'll find on InfraWorks 360 home. Hopefully what you've learned here will make it easier for you to find what you're looking for and get to work.

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