INFRAWORKS OFFERS ENHANCEMENTS TO DESIGN AND COLLABORATION AND CONNECTS BIM TO GIS.
I’m excited to share the improvements delivered in this year’s first update to InfraWorks. One way Autodesk delivers value to subscribers is by releasing new capabilities and improvements as they become available, which means more frequent releases and continuous product improvement throughout the year.
When making decisions about how to shape InfraWorks to support your work, the product development team aligns around three key themes: design, optimize, and connect. Our goals are to:
- Provide an intuitive design experience that models a high degree of accuracy and detail
- Automate repetitive tasks, keeping the software reliable and efficient and adding analysis and simulation to optimize your designs while increasing your productivity
- Connect project teams and data with AEC-focused collaboration tools that support multidisciplinary workflows throughout the project lifecycle
This update reflects our focus on enhancing design and connecting workflows. It’s a special update because, along with the helpful improvements to existing workflows, we have added a new capability that connects data in a way never done before. But first, let’s talk about the improvements.
Design
We continue to enhance and improve road modeling for preliminary design.
Precision Edits for Profiles
The Curve Properties panel in profile view has always displayed geometric values of a selected vertical curve. Now, you can modify those values and immediately see them in profile view. Typing in values for geometric properties is a more direct, and therefore more efficient, way of modifying vertical curves.
Delayed Model Regeneration
Formerly, when an aspect of a road—a horizontal alignment, a vertical alignment, or a component, such as a lane or curb—was modified, the InfraWorks model regenerated after each individual change. The process could be quite time-consuming and interrupted designers’ workflows. Ideally, we might solve this problem by making model regeneration times faster and nearly instantaneous, but for now we have provided an alternative.
The “Delayed Road Regeneration” setting in Application Options reduces the number of times the model will update or regenerate while editing horizontal alignments and components. This allows you to delay regeneration until after a series of edits are complete. The tooltips and markers in-canvas help you keep track of your edits and those that need to be committed to the model by regenerating it.
Connect
Improvements to Shared Views
InfraWorks models are accessible via web and mobile devices using shared views. Now the feature allows you to include bookmarks and detailed model data.
BIM 360 Document Management
For those of you with access to projects in multiple, different BIM 360 accounts, finding the right model has been challenging because the corresponding account wasn’t indicated. Now, when opening, publishing or syncing an InfraWorks model with BIM 360, you will see both the account and project names so that you can more easily select the correct model.
BIM+GIS Workflows
Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS (preview)
On to the big news: InfraWorks now includes our initial step towards improved BIM+GIS workflows. It is one of the first in-product capabilities resulting from the alliance announced last November between Autodesk and ESRI. (Yes, we’re really excited about that.)
Use the connector to build an InfraWorks model directly from GIS data published to ArcGIS Online. All the data in the GIS comes into InfraWorks, too. (You’ll see it on the Stack when you select an asset. You might think of it as similar to Civil 3D Property Set.) When the GIS data is updated, the InfraWorks model can be updated and refreshed. We decided to add the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS to the Data Sources panel because it allows you to build the model incrementally, adding more data as you need it.
Learn what else is new in InfraWorks.
Place your models in real-world context using GIS data.
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