Enhanced Functionality for Roads, Bridges, and More
On January 25, 2018, Autodesk released InfraWorks® 2018.2. This release is chock full of new enhancements. Here, I’ll explain the new features and their functionality.
Roadway Design
Component Road label prefixes have been added so it’s easier to tell the difference between fixed stations and horizontal geometry.
Figure 1
The in-canvas and stack for Spiral editing has added curve radius, curve length, and A values for Spiral In and Spiral Out. If you click on the values shown in-canvas, you will then be able to edit the values.
Figure 2
Right-clicking in-canvas on a road tangent will give you the option to Add a Curve (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Right-clicking in profile view on a PVI will give you the option to Add a Vertical Curve and specify the vertical curve properties (Figures 4 and 5).
Figure 4
Figure 5
Right-of-Ways, Parcels, and Easements now display length and area, which can be edited in-canvas. There is also a new keyboard shortcut in case you want to lock the length value (Figure 6).
Figure 6
Bridge Design
Parametric bridge parameters can now be viewed in-canvas through the Style palette. The configure dialog shows parameters from Autodesk Inventor® when configured properly. The size of the text has been formatted as well as an import/export option (Figure 7).
Figure 7
Quantities and Analysis
You now have the ability to specify a station range for road, bridge, and drainage materials. Also, you can perform this same operation by selecting an area of interest (AOI) such as a parcel, easement, or right-of-way. After you select your AOI, the results are shown. These values will update if you adjust the extents of the AOI (Figure 8).
Figure 8
Utilities quantities, such as drainage components or generic pipes, are calculated by depth range.
Point Clouds
Realistic information can be shown by using photographic images along with point clouds during linear feature extraction and vertical modeling (Figure 9).
Figure 9
You can choose to snap or merge the lines when joining two linear features (Figure 10).
Figure 10
It’s now easier, in the cross section view, to add vertices for linear features (Figure 11).
Figure 11
There is now a choice to delete a selected feature, or all filtered features, by category or height when extracting vertical features (Figure 12).
Figure 12
Visualization
In-canvas labels can now be controlled for viewing in the Interaction View Settings dialog (Figure 13).
Figure 13
Conclusion
Special thanks to Elliott Rosenfeld of Autodesk for posting this on the blog BIMagination. Other learning resources include the What’s New Help Index inside of InfraWorks, and the Autodesk Civil Engineering Community Center,
http://civil-community.autodesk.com/.
Todd Rogers is a Customer Success Manager and Certified Autodesk Instructor with more than 23 years of experience in teaching, managing, and, providing hardware and software solutions for hundreds of engineering firms throughout the greater Houston, Texas area. Todd is a valued member of the Infrastructure Support Division (ISD) for Graitec USA (formerly Total CAD Systems, Inc.). He also holds the “Autodesk Expert Elite” status, a program to recognize individual community members who have made extraordinary contributions with helping customers by sharing knowledge, providing community leadership, and exemplifying an engaging style of collaboration that drives a healthy and valuable Autodesk customer community. He is an active blogger. Through his personal blog website (civil3dj.wordpress.com), he shares tips and solutions for Autodesk software issues.
