At Lands End

French, German, Chinese trials of Infrastructure Modeler now available!

It's official! You can now download 30-day trial versions of Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler 2012 in French, German, and Simplified Chinese (in addition to English).  We're very excited to be able to have customers able to experience and use Infrastructure Modeler in their native languages.  Watch this space... we'll have more languages to announce soon!

Click here for the Infrastructure Modeler trial page.

Infrastructure Modeler experiments at the City of Vancouver

As many of you know, the City of Vancouver is a great customer and fantastic research partner of ours, helping us to investigate many of the planning workflows that helped form the initial requirements for Infrastructure Modeler.  These days the City is experimenting with Infrastructure Modeler and still sending us lots of information about possible areas we could go with the product,

Recently, Dan Campbell of the COV has been playing with some of the high res imagery and terrain he has for the City, some of the ASTER data for the surroundings, and about 170,000 building assets including some 3DS and many GIS 2D footprint-derived models.  You can see below that the results with the help of Infrastructure Modeler are pretty stunning.

Looking at these is also making me yearn for ski season and oysters!

Imagery produced in Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler 2012 and courtesy City of Vancouver, IT Department, Financial Services Group.  Data owned by City of Vancouver with some ASTER V2 data.  ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.

Playing with new ASTER V2 terrain in Infrastructure Modeler... cool graphics potential galore.

I saw an article on the newly released ASTER V2 terrain (30m, I believe) that has been released by the US and Japanese governments.  I couldn't resist downloading some of the terrain and trying it out.  Pretty cool for a starter dataset that you can grab for pretty much anywhere in the world (unless you're concerned about the North or South Pole...).

The data can be downloaded here.  Took me a sec to figure it out, but you can do a spatial select and note that their map server is just really slow.

Here are a couple of images from some Canary Islands data (with overlay from Landsat Legacy aerial images).

View from the top of La Palma

Lanzarote

For scale, I sketched in the Tenerife Airport.  The terrain resolution isn't bad.

 

ASTER terrain obtained from NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC). ASTER L1B. USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. 2001. Landsat imagery downloaded from US Department of Interior/USGS.

Is Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler a GIS tool? Yes!

I am currently on a trip visiting customers and partners in Germany and France.  Many of the customers here are interested in using 3D and BIM to explore the as-is environment for large urban areas.  I've gotten a few questions about whether or not Infrastructure Modeler is a GIS tool.

Here's what I say:

Q: Is Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler a GIS tool? 

A: Short answer: AIM provides GIS capability that is part of the Autodesk Infrastructure solution for geospatial professionals 

A: Long answer:  GIS is a product or system that stores, displays, and analyzes information that has a spatial component related to real world coordinates.  By definition, AIM is a GIS application.

Here are some of the GIS features of AIM:

• FDO data, terrain data, and models with accurate geolocation information appear in their correct real world position
• Geospatial imagery and coverage layers may be superpositioned according to user priority
• Every asset has a real world orientation and position
• Models can be built that are 100s of miles in dimension
• Assets can have attributes in addition to their position and graphics information (pipe condition, material, type; building age, owner, address; street condition, speed limit, surface material, for example)
• AIM can display unlimited thematic views of spatially arranged assets based on attribute values
• Many, many versions of spatial data with attributes can be stored in AIM to show the same data at different points in time or in different states
• Assets can be selected (queried) by spatial position or by attribute values
• Sketched or imported models without spatial positioning are assigned a spatial position and can be augmented with attributes
• Scripting tasks can allow more complex report generation and analysis such as generating 2D buffers, inspecting bounding box information, summarizing attribute values on selections
• Data exported with AIM also are exported with spatial positioning information (applies to 2D GIS export and FBX export)

 

Theme this!  

Roads themed by attribute value against a black-and-white urban scene.  

(Data courtesy City of Vancouver.) 

Carbon Disclosure Project webinar: Business case for C reporting

The Carbon Disclosure Project, a non-governmental organization that we sponsor and partner with on a cities-focused Carbon reporting platform, is hosting a webinar discussing the case for disclosing Carbon emissions for Cities and Companies.

Speakers

Sarah Nicholls, LEED Green Associate, Corporate Consultant, Jones Lang LaSalle
Jen Hawes-Hewitt, Manager, Global Strategy - Intelligent Cities, Accenture
Mark Bennett, Green Business Officer, Dublin City Council

This webinar will take place via Webex on Thursday 20th October at the following times:
0800 London / 0900 Europe / 1600 Tokyo and
1600 London / 1100 New York / 0800 San Francisco

Please RSVP and attend if you are interested.

Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler 2012 now available in French!

Hi folks,

Just a quick update that Infrastructure Modeler is now available in a French language version.  Customers who already have AIM, but want the French version should contact their reseller and ask for a language swap version.

More languages coming soon...