Breathing Some Life Into Infrastructure Planning

I’m working on some of the material for our upcoming CE News webcast on June 18, 2012 called:

Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure

I’m starting with a simple aggregation of some road centerlines, some parcel polygons and aerial imagery. There is nothing here that is special or fancy- just regular shapefiles. In the webcast we’ll see how planning activities that might have been previously done on paper or in two dimensions can be more effective in Infrastructure Modeler. I’ll also do some analysis in Map 3D and preliminary design in Civil 3D.

As I work through the material, I am reminded of this demonstration I did for our media launch this year. (If you are short on time, my part starts around minute 10). In this demo, I take a scanned raster image of a paper sketch, use Raster Design to rubbersheet the image and assign it a coordinate system. Then, I bring it into Infrastructure Modeler and use it as a guide for sketching a proposal. I’ve been able to take a piece of paper and “breathe some life into it.”

I also had the opportunity to deliver this demonstration to Matt Ball. You can find his write up here: Infrastructure Modeler: Autodesk’s Visual Model Management Tool.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s getting pretty late here and I want to head to bed soon, but before I do, I’m going to push this model into the cloud so that James and I can work on it more tomorrow. (Learn how to set up your Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler account in this video.)