Using Infraworks for Land Development and Master Planning

[Anonymous]

Hello there,

I am a Planner and Urban Designer and utilize Infraworks a great deal for preliminary base maps and 3d context models when creating presentation visuals.  In the past I’ve utilized SiteOps for quick and dirty planning studies that was always ‘good enough’ when creating outparcel pads with preliminary grading, but have switched to Infraworks because of compatibility with the AEC Suite and the efficiency in creating base and context 3d models.  However, I’m having difficulty finding an efficient work flow in creating outparcel pads within a proposed road/corridor network.  

What is the best workflow in establishing mass-graded land-use areas?

[mzjensen]

Do you have the option to use Civil 3D as well, or are you only using IW by itself?

[JamesMaeding]

We find its better to design in autocad, sometimes using civil3d, and then just use IW to show stuff in 3d.

One thing with our area - southern california O.C. - land is expensive.

Our chief planning person does things on mylar, then we get into CAD at some point.

I do the same when figuring out where to slide road and pads around, but also use cad to find contours for the roads out to right of way.

So I think the answer is: unless you are doing really simple stuff, and don't care about slopes eating into your developable pad area, there is no autodesk product that does it.

I have watched teams try to use corridors and grading objects and it becomes a big unstable mess.

[Anonymous]

I'm definitely not a fan of designing in Infraworks (or any digital format) first, however it is (would be) a great tool to quickly reflect an already designed plan in order to help a client/stakeholders visualize that particular option.  Sketching, to Civil 3D, to infraworks just bites into too much time this early on in the development process.

I agree that nothing quite exists yet to accomplish this 'quickly and efficiently'.  I suppose SiteOps is an alternative for this, but it's hard to justify the price if only using for that purpose.  Also, not always a fan of how the .tin turns out when exporting.

[Anonymous]

I do use Civil 3D as well, but I often find that spending the necessary time to get things designed in Civil (in order to show correctly in 3d) this early on in the development process turns out to just eat up way too much time.  The overall goal is to show clients/stakeholders a contextual visual on a 'preliminary' budget.  Infraworks is great w/ road improvement projects or even potential greenway projects (or even for grabbing decent quality topo for base maps and utilizing with shapefiles), but haven't quote found its niche in Land Planning and Development yet.

[mzjensen]

I agree that it isn't quite there yet. We usually start with conceptual hand sketches for different site layouts and then clean up the linework in Civil 3D. Drawing parcels in Infraworks is not really usable in my opinion. From Civil 3D I'll export linework to .SDF and then import to Infraworks as coverage areas for presentation. The USGS topo is great for visualization but not appropriate for preliminary earthwork calcs in my opinion. I would love to find a way to utilize Infraworks to get a quick quantity take-off, but we usually just use whatever we have drawn in Civil 3D for quick numbers.

So in a nutshell, at this point we basically just use Infraworks to display what we already have in Civil 3D.

[JamesMaeding]

@mzjensen

I am finding for projects 500 acres and less, it is cost effective to drone fly the site and get the surface from the point cloud. For volumes, you could probably use the "grid" surface the progs like sitescan, drone deploy, and photoscan make, but I made my own prog to get to a thinned point cloud. LAStools and Carlson P3D are common solutions too. Either way, its becoming real on our projects. I have not tried the nearmap 3d products, that might be useful too.

We keep talking about preliminary design, and that means way different things for different parties. For us, it is carving up land and knowing the developable pad area, and grading extents. I have yet to find anything that automates the process. There are so many moving parts that no one has automated them together. So we do individual tasks on the computer, like showing road contours. We don't use civil3d corridors though, we have our own tools that make 3d items out of alignment data.

[mzjensen]

@JamesMaeding have you used the point cloud tools in Infraworks? We do a lot of the UAV stuff as well and mainly use Pix4D, but I've been curious how practical the Recap/Infraworks workflow actually is.

[JamesMaeding]

@mzjensen

My experience is the adesk point cloud workflows are useless for getting to "optimized" TIN surface.

C3D crashes on pt clouds over 8 million, and IW does not do "optimized" (irregular sized tries, with large ones for flat areas) TIN.

The whole recap game is annoying, as everyone else uses .laz and they had that and took it out of acad and IW.

The marketing people have really messed things up.

I'm still watching for those that have had good experiences with doing things with pt clouds in IW.

I know they work great if you are just displaying - no issues there, and that is how I use IW, to assemble things to a model, not make things. If they would focus on allowing more to be assembled easier, they would do good.

Instead they want to add "design features" as they think it will get more customers. Unfortunately, they lost those customers because they stopped developing C3D in foundational ways. Their goal of making an ultra-hooked together model has failed because it was never the need. We need easily sharable data like LDT had, before dynamicness. They won't redo things though.

[ramesh_sridharan]

@JamesMaeding Have you tried running "Point Cloud Terrain" in IW and use "Export Point Cloud Extraction" to export processed ground as RCS which can be used to created TIN surface in IW.

User can also extract 3D breaklines from IW, export them as well which can be included as breaklines in C3D Surface.

Or if user prefers, user can just use the breaklines in C3D to generate surface.