InfraWorks 360, What Can You Do for Me?
With the introduction of 3D visualization programs, many industries have wondered about the opportunities and limitations of each new tool available to us. We ask ourselves: What software/platform is the most convenient for my company? What training tools and support are available to learn and proactively apply these new resources? Is it going to make my job easier, or at least less complicated? Do I really need this? If my competition is not using it, why should I?
Some of these questions (and many more) come into play when we talk about InfraWorks® 360, formerly Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (AIM). Since its first application, we have found how powerful, versatile, and simple a 3D program can be. With its introduction in 2012, when AIM was released as a conceptual design program for infrastructure projects, it was the first tool that offered the possibility of integrating and combining civil, architectural, and geospatial data while simulating the different project components in both 3D and real time.
What makes Autodesk’s InfraWorks 360 different than any other program is its commitment to our industry and its capacity to continuously evolve around a designer’s needs, industry inputs, and even programmers all over the world. For those of us who have been given the chance to work with this new platform, we remember the days when the only way to access data was by painfully searching online for the individual files with the necessary information to put models together (surfaces, roadway baselines, hydrography, geological conditions, etc.). Autodesk listened to the challenges we faced and our requests for tools to make our jobs easier. As a result, they have developed, in my opinion as a designer, one of the more practical tools for developing conceptual images: Model Builder. The development of this program speaks highly of Autodesk and what we can expect from them in the years to come.
Let me put use of this tool into a practical scenario: you have been assigned to a roadway design team and the project scope requires a modification to the main road alignment to allow better traffic flows and safer driving conditions. You have the option to develop more than one alternative as a solution, which will require preliminary design for each one.
Do you remember doing this before InfraWorks 360? How much time do you have to apply to each alternative development and how can you determine the best solution for the problem at hand?
Here is where the InfraWorks 360 tool comes into play. With a clear understanding of the project scope and its limits, as well as the defined critical components such as roads, drainage conditions, current structures, and demographics (among many others), you can simply command Model Builder to create an intelligent, three-dimensional model of the existing elements. You can then use the model to create, edit, and detail the many different recommended alternatives, as well as produce elegant presentations through its visualization options. These features create an easy bridge of understanding and communication with clients and project stakeholders.
With the adjacent icons, we have access to the different modules that over the last few years InfraWorks 360 has introduced and improved upon: roadway, bridge, and drainage design. More recently, the impressive display of new traffic simulation, profile and corridor optimization with sight distance analysis options, and new features within the 2016 release are incredibly helpful and easy to learn and use, whether used as a preliminary or final design tool for presentation and interpretation.
Nevertheless, like all things in life, nothing is perfect. As much as InfraWorks 360 is a dynamic and easy program to use in approaching design challenges, its biggest limitations are based on the lack of data reliability obtained through Model Builder, hence its inability to provide trustworthy information for actual design processes. The platform is constantly evolving, but when approaching InfraWorks 360 at its current stage, we need to ensure that it remains a marketing and preliminary design tool to help determine the best possible approach into the formal final design phase, which saves time and money and provides our clients with more visual and understandable elements with which to make decisions.
Regardless of its limitations, Autodesk provides us with a family of programs that interact with one another in a way that complements every aspect of our design process. InfraWorks 360 works closely with AutoCAD® Civil 3D to encompass every aspect in our projects, making an efficient combination for infrastructure design.
Oscar Castaneda is a Transportation Design Engineer and AutoCAD Manager at Infrastructure Engineers Inc., in Florida. Oscar received his bachelor’s degree from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia (South America), and also has an education in Architectural Design and Construction.
