From the course: Learning Infraworks

Analyzing terrain - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: Learning Infraworks

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Analyzing terrain

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- Many of the projects you work on in InfraWorks will involve studying changes in the terrain. Let's take a look at a few tools that help you analyze the terrain and answer important questions about your model. I've opened the Chapter 7 Hotel Lynda model and set the Chapter 7 proposal as the current proposal. I'll also choose the Hotel Plan bookmark. The first tool I want to look at is Terrain Statistics. I think it's easier just to launch the tool, run through the steps, and then talk about the results that you get. What you'll notice by the tooltip there that the job of the Terrain Statistics tool is to measure terrain, area and volume. I'm going to draw a polygon around our hotel site, where we've created some coverages that actually modify the terrain. I'll double-click the last point to indicate that I'm done drawing the shape, and InfraWorks will analyze the area that I've indicated and give me some information about it. The total length of that area is 0.7 miles. The 2D area is 857,000 square feet, so on and so forth. What I'm really interested in are the cut, fill and net numbers. Notice that the cut value is only 18,000 cubic yards, but the fill value is 165,000 cubic yards. Almost 10 times as much. That tells me that my site has a lot more fill than cut, and that I'm going to have to haul material in to grade this site. That can be really expensive, but it might be necessary for my project, maybe to raise it up from a certain flood level, or for visibility, or for any number of reasons. The important thing is that I know how much fill is going to be required to build this site. That's something I can tell the developer or other stakeholders that's going to affect the cost of construction. What's really amazing is that I was able to acquire that number in literally a few seconds. Let's look at another way, a completely different way, of analyzing terrain. Let's say we want to see what happens to this site when there's a bad storm, and we've got a storm surge coming in from the ocean. To accomplish this, I'm going to click the Terrain Themes tool over here on the toolbar to the left. The Terrain Themes will color-code sections of my model based on certain properties. We'll do a very simple terrain theme, starting by clicking the green plus sign to add the new theme. And I'll call this new theme "50-foot storm surge". The analysis type is going to be Elevation, but I just want you to see some of the different choices that we have. Aspect is the direction that the hillsides face. We can also analyze slope. We have a minimum and maximum value, and we can also break down the number of rules or ranges that we want to provide. And in this case I just simply want to look at all elevations from zero to 50, and I want them all to be displayed in blue. So I only have one range, and it's going to be blue. So my minimum value is whatever the default value is. It was extracted from the model itself. My maximum value is 50. I only want one rule, or one color, displayed in the model, and that color is going to be blue. To make it interesting, I'm going to add a little transparency to that color, so we can actually see the model through it a bit. I'll click OK, and we can see the blue that's been added to the model that shows us where the flood zone is going to be if the water level rises by 50 feet, or if it rises to 50 feet. And we can see that our hotel property actually remains intact for the most part. We've got a little bit of flooding right here, but really no harm done. But it's quite close. We can see it comes right up to our new road but doesn't quite encroach too much on the hotel property. So it looks like we're safe with a 50-foot storm surge. What about a 100-foot? We can actually select this one and copy it. And I'll name this one "100-foot storm surge". Then it's just a matter of clicking the Edit icon and changing that 50 to a 100. Now I can check the box next to the 100-foot storm surge, and now we see that the flooding is quite a bit more widespread, and definitely is going to affect our hotel property and much of the property behind us. Using the checkboxes here, we can switch back and forth between the 50 and the 100, or any themes that we create in between. As you've seen, not only can InfraWorks generate stunning models of your design ideas, it can also do the heavy lifting of analyzing your design and providing useful information so that you can answer important questions about your project.

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