Home page - InfraWorks Tutorial

- [Instructor] As we open InfraWorks, the very first thing we see is this home page. And as we begin to navigate, we recognize that the home page really provides us a lot of information before we even get to our model, configurations, and means to view this information right at our fingertips before we open that model. Of course the last models that we opened are going to be available to us and displayed in these tiles with a preview of the home view shown in these tiles. Now if you flip over these tiles, you'll notice different buttons open up along the bottom. You can view the location of those exercise files. You can delete a model. You can duplicate a model. Or you can simply open the model. Now you can choose the option down here or you can simply click on the tile and that will open the model as well. Now notice this one has different options because currently the model is located in the cloud so before you open it, you will have to download it. Clicking on either one will create a local copy of that model. And you'll notice these down below also have a different icon. This is because these models, although listed in the InfraWorks model folder directory location, have not been open with the current InfraWorks. So they'll have to be upgraded and this is what this little information tab provides. It says it's an older version and it must be upgraded. Now on the right side, you'll notice there's information about the version of InfraWorks that we're working in whether it's a subscription version or not. Potential add-ons as you see up here. And then some preview tools and these are really tools that are being tested but may not have been released yet. We may use some of these as we get further in. Because Autodesk InfraWorks is a subscription based software, everything really is connected to your subscription. So notice your subscription and everything about your subscription is located in the top left. You have your icon for your subscription. And if you click on your name or you click on the three lines that represent the menu there for your subscription, you can manage your subscription. You can look at your BIM 360 or Autodesk 360 profile here. You can get better information about your BIM 360 Collaboration which we can also do right here. Open up our projects in BIM 360 from the Cloud. But you also notice here that we have additional options that we can set for the application. Let's go ahead and walk through these additional application options and we'll start with the general options. The general options contains your application language, and then mainly where to store the local versions of the cloud models. I mentioned that if we clicked on this to open it, we would download a model, and where would it be located. As well as the location of the cached models that you've already opened. Now cached information about your models really speeds up the loading of your models whether it's in the cloud or even local here with a generated surface tiles, it allows you to display the information much quicker even once it's opened to be able to navigate that model. The navigation options, we're going to take a little bit closer look at later. When we're looking at the view capabilities of InfraWorks. Now the model generation options allows us to set the level of detail for our model more focused on how that model's going to be generated, not so much the viewing of that model. Those graphics, we'll look at that in another section. But both of these sections, the model generation and the 3D graphics really works together to establish how detailed your model is going to be. Now the more detail we have, the slower it will take to generate and work around in your model. We have the means to manage how much information is detailed out and even how many CPU threads are being used to work through this process as we manage our model generation. The units options here in the configuration, they're a little bit more detailed than the units you would find in AutoCAD, but definitely fewer settings than what you may find in the Civil 3D E, if you go to the drawing settings and the ambient settings. There's a similarity here. So starting off we would choose our default units and we can choose imperial here, and then based upon the default units, it'll display the different values or units that we're working in. So if you wanted to change any of these, you select them, and of course you can change them from the parameters that are available over here. Not only the type but also the precision. And those are the basic units. You also have your Transportation and Structure units that you can make adjustments to as well. As we previously mentioned, the 3D graphics options gives us more control over the quality of the display, and by default it's set to pretty much be at middle of our display detail. And notice it's chosen to be optimized really for the quality. The lower we slide this, the more it will be optimized for speed. As we mentioned before, the more level, more detail that we display, the longer it takes to load and more memory it takes. You can also control the realism of your model. So notice here you can check whether or not water has a reflection as well as if the water is moving, and whether shadows are automatically added as you navigate or display your model based upon the location of the sun. Now of course all of these things create a nice realism to our model, but also takes up a little more memory and speed as well. The data import options, right now only really presents us the data import options for Navisworks models. Now we build our models in InfraWorks based upon existing data, and then we can of course create from that existing data. One of the data options we can use is a Navisworks model. Now InfraWorks will still need a means to import that data and so they'll need a means whether it's using the cloud to import that data or the Navisworks software that you have currently installed on your computer to work with that. You get to choose whether it's going to be kind of converted so to speak in the cloud or using your software that's on your computer. Finally in our application options, you'll see there's point cloud options. It's really managing those points and we'll take a closer look at those later as well. So I'm going to click okay here. Now along the top left, you'll notice there's also the means to open up our projects in a browser. In BIM 360, we can also manage our 360 settings, how we share those models with others. And a new feature is being able to share views. Now we're going to take a look at this function a little later. Now since the last model that we opened in InfraWorks does not close until either the application, the InfraWorks application closes or you open up another model, you can come back to this home page at any time and you're not closing your model as you make configuration adjustments. Now that we've been introduced to our starting page or our home page here, let's go in and use some of that functionality and look at creating model builder. Now notice before we do that, you do have the ability to control what tiles are displayed. You can use the filter means to control which ones are being displayed. You can search from the current tiles or you an sort by date, by name, or even how those are going to be displayed. So date and name sorting. You can open up models that aren't being displayed in tiles by browsing to those models. We'll use that function a lot. So let's go ahead in our next exercise and look at the Model Builder function and see how it really helps us get a good base to start with.