From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

Working with Model Generation settings - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

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Working with Model Generation settings

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- [Voiceover] When you're thinking about presenting your model, you may want to boost some of the visual quality settings to go from a working mode to a presentation mode. Let's look at some important settings you'll want to know about. I'm in the Chapter six Lynda Heights model, and I've chosen a proposal called Presentation and a bookmark called Clubhouse, which gets me zoomed-in where I can clearly see the face of the building for our Clubhouse. Now you might notice that the building looks a little different than it did in the video's in the previous chapter or maybe the chapter's even before that. And that's because of I kind of backed off the setting I was talking about so we can discuss what happens when you change it. And that's one of the three settings we're going to discuss. But to get into where we need to be, I'm going to click the settings in Utilities icon, which you can see I already have, and then within that set of tools, we have the Application Options command, so I'll click that also. For now, we wanna focus in this Model Generation section, and you can see there's a list here of six or seven or eight settings. We're gonna focus on three. Building Facade Detail, Terrain Simplification, and Pre-compute Ambient Occlusion. And remember, our discussion here is to talk about balancing between the visual quality that we see in the model and the performance of the computer. And the idea of being that up till now, we may have really backed off on these settings so that we can navigate quickly in the model and make all the changes we need to make. Now that the changes are done, we're ready to really visualize this model, so we wanna crank things back up again from that perspective. So, Building Facade Detail is a good one to talk about first. You can see it's currently set to low and if I slide the dialog out of the way, you can see it's almost like a scene has been painted on the flat face of the building. There's no three-dimensional detail to it. So I'm going to crank up this to high, click OK, and when I do, nothing's going to happen. That's because I need to regenerate the model in order to see the affect in this case. There aren't many things in Infraworks 360 that you have to regenerate after doing them, but this is one. So, I'll click regenerate. One of the kind of bummers about regenerating is that it's going to reset my view of the model to the Home view. Luckily I have a bookmark, called Clubhouse, and I can just click on that and go right back into the model. So now you can see what's been done to the building with that Facade setting set to high. There's much more detail, it's a three-dimensional facade, I actually see shadows that are cast, and it's just a much more beautiful look to the building, much more detail, and obviously the three-dimensions as well. Now if you have a lot of buildings in your model and with facades, which by the way, these guys in the back, these are not buildings with facades, they're actual three-dimensional models of buildings, so they're completely not affected by this setting. But if I had a bunch of buildings in my model, and I turn this setting on, I may see a really drastic affect to the performance of the model. In my case, we only have one building. It's a fairly small model, and it really doesn't have an affect. And I have a pretty good computer, so that plays a part in it as well. So that's the first setting we'll discuss. The second one I wanna talk about is called Terrain Simplification. And you can probably guess what we're gonna do here, just by the name of the setting. Before I apply this though, I wanna change a few things. I'm going to pick a bookmark called Terrain. And I'm gonna turn on Wireframe, and I'll do that by clicking the Core tools, the Create icon, and then Wireframe. And the reason I picked this view is because I've got a pretty dense terrain in this area, you can see all the triangles and all the lines, it's a very complex and sophisticated. So now we'll go back into our settings and we'll use Terrain Simplification to simplify the set-up of our terrain. And I'm gonna type 50 here. It's kind of a percentage where zero is original, 50% simplification is going to remove some of the lines, and result in bigger triangles. And then the closer you get to 100, you're kind of completely flattening out the terrain, and removing all the detail. So, 50's a good guess, and you might wanna do an iterative approach to this when you're doing this on your own models. I'll click OK, and I have to regenerate the model because in the process of regenerating the model it's going to recalculate the terrain and apply that simplification factor. When it's done, I'll restore my bookmark. Once again, this one's called Terrain, and we can see now that there are a lot fewer triangles in the terrain model. And if you've got a really large model with a really densely configured terrain, this can have a huge impact on the performance of the model. And, depending on how the model is originally and how much simplification you apply, it may or may not have a big impact on the shape of the terrain. If I turn the Wireframe off, take a look at the shape of the terrain, I really don't see a huge difference. So I'll just have to inspect it closely, and see if I'm happy with the result or if it just has flattened things out a little too much. But for now, for this example we can go ahead and leave it as is. The third setting I wanna talk to you about, I really can't demonstrate, because it doesn't have a very dramatic impact on the model, but it can affect performance. So, that's this last one here, Pre-Commute Ambient Occlusion. Without getting too deep into this, Ambient Occlusion has to do with how light bounces off of different parts of the model. And what I found is that turning it on really doesn't have a very dramatic affect on the model, and that having it off, actually helps with performance a little bit. So, my choice or my suggestion is to keep it off and leave it off because the benefit's aren't worth what it can do to the performance of your model. So now you know about a few key settings that will help you find the right balance between visual quality and performance.

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