BIM on the Rocks

Friday Whetstone: Weekly Reads and Listens

Over the past year, there are three habits that I’ve managed to create for myself. Well, three positive habits. Countless destructive ones, too, I am sure.

Reading The Economist (almost) every week.

I received a free subscription to The Economist last year when I had some Delta miles that were about to expire. At first, I would bribe myself with M+Ms. For example, “If I read five more pages, I can have ten more M+Ms” After a while, both my husband and I were totally hooked and would fight over the magazine when it arrived on Fridays. Now, I read the iPad version and he reads the print version, so my marriage will remain intact.

Why do I like it? I find their perspective interesting. I like learning about news from around the world, and I am especially fascinated with economic news from Africa, China and Southeast Asia. It sometimes applies to my work, but usually doesn’t, however, I truly feel it has broadened my perspective and made even mundane decisions more informed. (Plain or peanut?)

One day last summer, I was sitting on the couch reading the magazine when my father in law was visiting. He asked, “What, are you trying to become erudite or something?” After I googled the word, I had to laugh. This was coming from a (originally from the UK) man who writes crossword puzzles for the New York Times. And, for the record, Clive, the answer is “Yes.”

Reading New Civil Engineer with their iPad App

New Civil Engineer is a terrific magazine. If I like ENR, I love NCE. If ENR is Breyer’s Vanilla, NCE is anything from Cold Stone. Or maybe that good gelato from a street vendor. But probably more like some other amazing ice cream that my sheltered American self hasn’t had the privilege to try.

NCE is an expensive magazine subscription. I paid for it one year with my Christmas money and cried when it ended. Much to my delight, I discovered their iPad app serves up issues for free.

What makes the magazine so great? Again, it’s about perspective. Learning about civil engineering projects all over UK, Europe and the world. I like seeing what is being done, who is doing it, how much things costs, and how they are tackling their challenges.

Using the Stitcher Smart Radio App to Keep Up with Podcasts

Listening to podcasts always seemed like a really great idea, but I would forget to download them. I heard about Stitcher and gave it a try. I started with my old favorites- Marketplace, This American Life, Grammar Girl and Freaknomics Radio. It organizes everything, downloads them for me with just a click and makes suggestions for other podcasts that I might enjoy. I don’t listen every day, but when I am in the mood to go for a walk or have a long car ride ahead, I am glad they are all ready to go.

Have a great weekend!

Using Raster Design to Crop and Convert MrSID

A few days ago, I posted about Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery. Jason asked the question:

The aerial image I often use is .sid format. A high resolution image that I bring into Civil 3D through the Map 3D data connect. Do you know how i can crop this image in Civil 3D or perhaps with raster? The image covers the entire city so I would like to crop it to my work area.

I have had this problem often myself! I am happy to report that the answer is YES. You can make those lovely, giant MrSID (*.sid) files more manageable with the help of Raster Design. (Which, if I haven’t already mentioned, is now part of the Infrastructure Design Suite. Eventually, I’ll stop saying that.)

One thing to note- in his question, Jason said he is using the Map 3D data connect for his .SID. In order to crop the image, you’ll have to either use Map Image Insert (MAPIINSERT) or the Insert button on the Raster Tools > Insert panel (IINSERT). For more information on different ways to insert images into Map 3D and Civil 3D, check out Connecting to a Raster Image through the FDO.

Here is a *.sid file that I have. It covers an entire small city in North Dakota called Grand Forks. When I lived in Canada, my colleagues in Manitoba used to talk about their big weekends hitting the mall in Grand Forks, so of course I was interested to check out this short interview on youtube: City of Grand Forks Interview on Autodesk Technology and Expectation of Changes. I was disappointed that they didn’t show the mall, but I am sure it is spectacular.

Anyway, here is the image. It’s a black and white 1’ resolution *.sid.

I made a rectangular region:

And cropped it down to a smaller corner of the city. I could have cropped it down to just the neighborhood or site I was working on if I wanted.

Using the Image Export tool, I get the choice to export the image to a few different formats, including bitmap (.bmp), tagged image file format (.tif. .tiff), Portable Network Graphics File (*.png), JPEG (.jpeg), and JPEG2000 (.jp2, .jp2K).

 

I get some choices on export quality, which could help you if the image file is large and you don’t need it to be quite as fine as the original.

As I mentioned in the post about georeferencing scanned images, I can export the image along with a world file. This way, I am making the image more manageable without losing that geographic intelligence.

Not hard, eh? That’s how you convert a MrSID (.sid) to JPEG (or one of many other) image formats using Raster Design.

Check out the other posts in this series:

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Georeferencing Scanned Images

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Merging Tiled Images

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Georeferencing Scanned Images

Have I mentioned that Raster Design is now included in the Infrastructure Design Suite?

Earlier this week, I posted some of my favorite uses for Raster Design, Merging Tiled Images and Cropping Aerial Imagery. Today, I want to talk about taking scanned sketches and giving them geographic intelligence.

Remember this guy? That guy that likes tracing paper, colored pencils and pentel sign pens? We met him over in Alignments from the Land Planners Curves.

Well, he’s awesome and everything, but I don’t always know what to do with his sketches. Using a combination of Raster Design, Infrastructure Modeler and Civil 3D, I can take his ideas and use them to get my model started.

(I actually show this workflow quickly in this video from our media launch (starting around minute 10) and mentioned it in a post called Breathing Some Life Into Infrastructure Planning)

Georeferencing Scanned Images, Especially Pencil Sketches

Insert the scanned image and just place it somewhere near the area it belongs. It is useful if you scan the tracing paper while taped to some sort of print out of a map or base plan like the image below. (The blue and green interchanges are pen sketches on tracing paper over a print out of my basemap.)

Of course, I wasn’t that smart for the example I have queued up for this post, but we’ll go with it.

Next use any combination of the Raster Design tools Match, Rubber Sheet, Scale, or Displace to get your sketch lined up where you need it.

Once you have the image where you want it, use Image Export to create a new image of the sketch, and include the creation of a world file.

I can continue to use it in the Civil 3D environment, or I can use it other places- like Infrastructure Modeler.

If your planner has multiple sketches, you can built them as proposals in Infrastructure Modeler and use Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler to share those proposals with your team.

If I want to take those conceptual centerlines back to Civil 3D to work on early stage design, I can use the IMX export from Infrastructure Modeler, then IMX import into Civil 3D. The yellow centerlines in the Civil 3D model are alignments. I can use some of the techniques I talked about in Alignments from the Land Planners Curves to begin some early corridor modeling and more detailed feasibility analysis.

James will touch on this workflow in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure. That’s TODAY! Don’t forget!

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery

 

Yesterday, I posted about Merging Tiled Images using Autodesk Raster Design.

Cropping Aerial Photography

Now that I have one image, I often only need a portion of it. This is especially true with road design projects- I just need an image that covers the road and some right of way area on either side.

You can make regular shapes, but I will use the Crop>Polygonal Region option to make a custom shape.

The image is cropped.

If you don’t like the black pieces, you could use a rectangular region, but keep in mind that black takes less time to load than detailed aerial imagery.

Circle can be useful as well if you need to focus on a specific radius.

Again, I’ll want to save this image with a new name and produce a world file. The major benefit to doing your image manipulation in Raster Design over an image editing program is that Raster Design understands that you need to keep things in the right location.

Working with these photos reminds me of a post I wrote about Conceptual Road Design Ideas and using imagery to complement planning exhibits.

James will talk about creating exhibits for planning and conceptual design  in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure.

Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Merging Tiled Images

Raster Design has been around awhile, but this year it was added to Infrastructure Design Suite. I’m really happy with everything we added to the suite this year, but I think Raster Design is one of those workhorse tools that quietly adds a lot of value.

Everyone I know who uses Raster Design has a few favorite workflows. Over the next few days, I’ll share some of mine. I’d love to hear yours.

Pasting Together Tiled Orthophotos

It always happens. You’re working on a site design or a road project and the information you need crosses tiny bits of about 9 high resolution orthophotos.

Insert the images so that they tile together, then use the Merge Images command to merge all of the images into one.

Note that the tool adds the images you choose to a destination image, so you’ll want to use the Save Image tool to prevent overwriting your originals. Or, change the Prompt Options.

If you work with tiled images a lot, you might like this old post about using the Map 3D Query tool to transform a bunch of images at once: Transforming Images from One Coordinate System to Another.

James will touch on another one of my favorite uses for Raster Design in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure

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.)

Autodesk BIM 360 takes Infrastructure Modeling to the Cloud

This is how we used to handle infrastructure scale collaboration, conceptual design and feasibility evaluation.

Today, we introduce Autodesk BIM 360. Autodesk BIM 360 is the next generation of BIM, is for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Autodesk BIM 360 helps multidiscipline design and construction teams improve project outcomes by moving computational-intensive tasks to the cloud, enabling more rapid visualization and simulation and optimized collaboration with access to intelligent data-rich models.

Conceptual design and feasibility evaluation service, featuring the Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler plug-in, enables users to publish, store, and manage large models in the cloud. Users can invite other authorized team members to access, download, and edit shared models and scenarios simultaneously, and review multiple project proposals using the same data more securely without sending files via email or external hard drives.

I’ve created a series of videos on youtube to help you get started with the Conceptual Design and Feasibility capabilities in Autodesk BIM 360.

The first video gives you an idea of how Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler can help your team collaborate on infrastructure models in the cloud.

The second video shows you how to login to the subscription center, download the plug-in and get your account established.

The third video takes you through creating groups and sharing your first model, and the final video gives you an idea on how your team can collaborate on conceptual design and feasibility evaluation using the cloud.

If you don’t have access to youtube, you can download these videos below:

Download 1_Autodesk BIM 360- Introduction to Conceptual Design and Feasibility Evaluation.mp4 (24866.5K)

Download 2_Autodesk BIM 360- Getting Started with Conceptual Design and Feasibility Evaluation.mp4 (9080.2K)

Download 3_Autodesk BIM 360- Getting Started with Your Account for Conceptual Design and Feasibility Evaluation.mp4 (15063.9K)

Download 4_Autodesk BIM 360- Getting Started Working With Your Team.mp4 (33972.3K)

 

Additional Resources:

Autodesk WikiHelp for Autodesk 360 Infrastructure Modeler

A Quick Spin: Infrastructure Modeler for Transportation Projects (youtube)

Getting Started with Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (vbook)

Posts on this blog where I use Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler:

Master Planned Community in Three (or One Hundred?) Acts

Master Planned Community: What Do You Mean By Medical Campus?

Master Planned Community: Parking for the Medical Campus

Trying Different Streetscapes in a Master Planned Community

Culvert Analysis in SSA

Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis offers users the ability to perform runoff calculations and hydraulic routing calculations in a single package.  This combines the best of both worlds.

SSA’s hydraulic calculations are founded in the EPA SWMM calculations which performs the one-dimensional Saint Venant flow equations. The Saint Venant equations consist of the continuity and momentum equations for conduits and a volume continuity equation at nodes.  What this means is culvert entrance and exit losses are computed not on the nodes themselves, but rather on the pipe ends.

Let’s dissect how this happens.

1. Open the SSA Sample Culvert file.  (C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\SSA 2013\Samples\Culvert\Culvert.spf)
2. Double Click on the Culvert Pipe shown in the image above.  The Shape definition is described as a “Culvert”.  In many cases, if you exported your Civil 3D Pipe network, the imported pipe may be just a “Pipe”.  
3. By selecting Culvert, the available properties of the conveyance link changes.
4. The HDS-5 Culvert type and Culvert Entrance properties become available.  Be sure to visit the Flow Properties section immediately below and properly set the Entrance and Entrance Losses.

The model is set for analysis. 

Here is one tip when exporting your Civil 3D pipe network.  If the Part Matching Default Settings on Export, set the upstream structure to Headwall, SSA imports that structure as a Junction, and sets the following downstream pipe to a Culvert.

One could conceivably use the Part Matching Customization Settings in SSA to match set a specific part family to a culvert, but that is a topic for another day.

Claiming Water Wednesday

This is a guest post by Matthew Anderson, PE CFM.  Dana has graciously allowed me to put together a series of posts for her BIM on the Rocks blog! Thanks Dana!

My family typically performs menu select with a bit of a rhyming game based on the day of the week.  For example, yesterday was Taco Tuesday. The kids enjoy trying to rhyme what we have to eat based on the day of the week. For this series of posts, I am claiming Wednesday for the similar reason; Wednesday will be henceforth known as Water Wednesday!

I am open to suggestions, or answering questions when it comes to the content of these posts – the only caveat being it needs to highlight the water resources tools available in AutoCAD Civil 3D or Map 3D. 

A few years ago when Autodesk University first introduced AU Virtual, I presented a class using the Hydraflow Express Extension.  A key component of that class discussed the use of catchment area to define the watershed area to a roadway cross-culvert.  Those values were then transferred to Hydraflow Express for a simple runoff calculation and culvert design. There were a lot of viewers, and a good response to the class.  One of the key benefits I highlighted was the Express Extension’s simplicity. 

In AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013, the Express Extension expands the ability of the user to solve more of the FHWA HDS-5 Culvert types. What was just an “Inlet Edge” input parameter in earlier versions, is now Culvert Type, and Culvert Entrance.  This brings Hydraflow Express closer to the requirements and options outlined in Federal Highway Administration HDS-5 document from 2005.  (FHWA HDS-5, 2005) .

This expands the available design solution options for roadway culverts in using Hydraflow Express.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next week, we we will review culvert routing in Autodesk Storm and Sanitary Analysis.

P.S. I know that FHWA recently released a new version of HDS-5 in February 2012.