Autodesk Infraworks, The under-rated tool, A gate to BIM & GIS Integration

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As a civil engineer deeply involved in the BIM & GIS worlds, I’m always searching for platforms that can mix all these worlds in a presentable way. And while some well-known solutions are well-marketed and continuously developed, I find that all these solutions are far behind Autodesk Infraworks.

I’m not saying here that Autodesk Infraworks is perfect software. Still, I’m saying that it has great potential and if some of its problems are resolved during the upcoming years, it can be the ultimate BIM/GIS integration platform; below are some of the reasons:

Infraworks is a great interoperability tool where the software can build you a terrain with satellite imagery and then adjust the terrain by importing your lidar scans or any other sources of Topography. You can also import Civil 3D surfaces, for example, design surfaces and use them to develop the project terrain further. In addition to the various design elements from Revit, Civil 3D, and Navis works, you can import IFC, Point Clouds, and Sketchup, amongst other BIM and 3D formats.
On the GIS side, while the software gives excellent attention to the Geolocation and the coordinate systems, it also provides a seamless connection with ArcGIS online to import all your GIS layers. Also, there are other options to import GIS layers.
The visualization side here is excellent; you can quickly get impressive shots or even a walkthrough video. However, you can export your model as FBX with its textures and use it in another software like Lumion.
The “Create” tab has valuable tools for designing infrastructure elements, including transportation, bridges, and drainage.
The software can work directly with BIM 360/ Autodesk Construction Cloud

The software requires some development and more tools to be added to make it more competitive, especially on the information side of BIM. However, it’s one of my favourite solutions as of today.

You can find more about the software and try it below link:

https://www.autodesk.ae/products/infraworks/overview

contact.thehalforange · ‎10-14-2022

Verry good

Elmoataz.Bellah.Salem · ‎10-14-2022

Informative Blog ,thanks for Publishing

Matheus-Lima · ‎10-23-2022

Thank you for the insights, @MostafaElashmawy! I think InfraWorks is a great software in BIM/GIS integration workflows and no doubt it has enormous potential. The possibility of connecting with ESRI solutions and the Autodesk Cloud is fantastic.

I believe that could be more updates, especially on traffic simulations, pipes editing, gradings with berms... There are great suggestions in InfraWorks Ideas Forum: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/infraworks-ideas/idb-p/129.

By the way, just discovered here your videos about BIM and EE program, learning a lot from you, thanks!

eblackburnEFFVJ · ‎12-22-2022

I've been using Infraworks to easily and quickly generate site context for some of our recent projects. If you export IW as an FBX file, you import that into Formit Pro, and then can Import CAD > FBX into Revit. That brings all of the aerial imagery, terrain, buildings, roads, water features, etc. into Revit for rendering with the Enscape3D plugin.

My issue is that it takes a very long time to fix the bridges in IW as they come out of Model Builder draping the terrain and not set to the correct elevations. After changing the road into a component road and adding a bridge feature to the road, I then have to fix every vertex and adjust it to a realistic elevation. Is there a better or faster way of doing this?

nicolasmenu · ‎06-28-2023

Should you find lidar for your area, you possibly can bring in only the class of point "bridge" from your lidar dataset. Remove the infraworks bridge and let the point clouds data do its magic. For visualization purpose, it s usually fine. (you wont have the piles though)