Preliminary Roadway Design Using InfraWorks

BRIAN HAILEY: All right, welcome everybody. We're going to go ahead and get started. Welcome, second session of Autodesk University. Did everybody get something out of their first session? Yeah? Awesome. Let me guess-- you were the folks that, in high school, ditched the pep rallies?

[LAUGHTER]

The general session is going on right now. I thought for sure nobody would sign up for this class. I thought the people that did sign up for the class would realize that the general session is going on right now and go to that. So thank you. I'm honored that you guys decided to choose my class over the general session. So I am honored for that.

My name is Brian Hailey. This class is Preliminary Roadway Design in InfraWorks. So we're going to get into preliminary design. We are going to stay completely within InfraWorks. I'm not going to get into Civil 3D or anything else. This is strictly within InfraWorks.

A little bit of background on me-- my name is Brian. I think I already said that. I work for Applied Software. We're a reseller based out of Atlanta. I'm in the Denver office, so I get to play in the snow.

I am a licensed engineer in Colorado. I'm an Autodesk certified instructor. I'm a member of the Autodesk expert elite. I've been doing this-- I think this is the 12th time I've been to AU, something along those lines. I decided to look back through my images and found the first picture I put of my boys up in one of my PowerPoint slides. I think it was the third presentation I did. They've grown up a wee bit over the years. So there we go.

Applied Software-- we are an approved provider on the Autodesk Service Marketplace. I just had this-- told to put the slide in just recently. So if you guys need any customization, training, those types of things, feel free to reach out to me or anybody on my team.

We do have a format change for the class. I did send an email out to everybody. I hope everybody got it. The class was originally scheduled to be an hour, 60 minutes, 10:30 to 11:30. I was cramming and trying to get all this information into 60 minutes. I reached out to the Autodesk team and said, oh, I can't do that. Can I do 90 minutes instead?

And they said, sure. So I don't know if you guys know this, but the general session has been extended to go out till 12:15. So we're going to go from 10:30 to 12. Lunch doesn't start till 12:15. That's when the general session gets out.

If anybody needs to leave at 11:30, feel free. I'm not going to mark anybody down on their grades or anything like that if you have to leave early. Just feel free to do so. I just ask that you just do it quietly.

Trivia time-- I always like to start class with a little bit of trivia. So the trivia question I've got today-- what is the longest continuous commercial street in the United States?

OK, so let's narrow it down. What is a street? So a street is a road in a city or town, typically lined with buildings. And what'd you say?

AUDIENCE: Colfax Avenue.

BRIAN HAILEY: Colfax Avenue. Where is that?

AUDIENCE: Denver.

BRIAN HAILEY: Yeah, that's right. It's Colfax avenue in the Denver area. This thing is-- look at that. It goes all the way across the metro area. Yes sir?

AUDIENCE: I think there's a street in Iowa that's longer.

BRIAN HAILEY: Is there? OK. This is a commercial street, so there's no residential on it. Just a little bit of facts about this-- it is 26 miles long, and it is all within a city. Or not within a city, but within-- it doesn't leave cities. So it's not a county road. It's not a state highway. It is just a street. There's no residential along it.

Playboy called it "The longest, wickedest street in America." I tried to find some actual confirmation that that actually came from Playboy, and I haven't been able to find it. But I do know that the next one is 100% true-- my wife likes to call it "The bad road." If anybody is from the Denver area, you'll get that. East Colfax, that's-- when you're growing up in the Denver area, East Colfax is where all the prostitutes and drug dealers are. At least, that's what we were always told.

So preliminary roadway design in InfraWorks. So what are we going to talk about today? Well, first, we're going to get in and we're going to create the existing model. So when we're doing preliminary design, you have to have something to base your design on. We're doing preliminary design. We're not going to go out and get it surveyed. I don't want to spend that kind of cash on this. So we're going to go in and figure out some ways to create that existing conditions.

Next, we're going to get in and actually lay out the roadway. So where are we going to go, both horizontally as well as vertically.

Once we get it laid out, we're going to come in and start modifying the cross sections. So maybe part of this road needs to be two lanes. Part of it needs to be three lanes. So how do I do that? We're going up a hill, and we need to put in a passing lane to get around the slow trucks. I want to put in an additional lane, but just in this piece of it.

And then finally, I want to be able to visualize the design, and I want to be able to share this with stakeholders. So how do I get this information across to other people? So those are the processes that we're going to go through in this particular class.

So first, we're going to start off with creating the existing conditions. Now, there's two different ways that we're going to go about doing this. The first is, we're going to start off by using GIS data. So GIS data. Does anybody know what GIS stands for? Yes?

AUDIENCE: Geographical information system.

BRIAN HAILEY: Geographical information system. That's close. That's not quite it. Does anybody else know? What is it?

AUDIENCE: Get it surveyed.

BRIAN HAILEY: Get it surveyed. Guessing is safer. Golly, it's somewhere. Yeah, but no, you were right, on geographic information system. I like to joke about the "Get it surveyed," because a lot of times, geographic information system data isn't spot on, and you don't want to use it, necessarily, for design. But it is fantastic for preliminary design.

So we're going to bring in some GIS data. The other way we can do it is, well, I don't have any GIS data. I just want to create a model. And so we're going to use Model Builder to also create a-- the existing conditions.

Now, I am going to do this live. So I don't do videos. So I apologize to those of you that really like to watch videos, but I figured, this is AU. Let me go ahead and crash the software in front of you.

So what I've got here is I've got InfraWorks open. I created it a new model. I did nothing to this model yet. In fact, I just created this morning. All I did was say "New," and I gave it a name and told it where to save it. I didn't do this live, because this takes a couple minutes to do.

And what I want to do now is I want to bring some GIS data into here. So I've got a folder that has my GIS data in it. So I went to the city. I downloaded this stuff. I went to the state, the county, wherever it was that I got this stuff. Maybe you have this in-house. And now I want to start using this data.

So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in the terrain. So I've got a DEM-- digital elevation model. And this is a GeoTIFF. So how do we add this in? Well, it's really, really tricky. What you do is you take that file and you drag it into the model. And you release, and it's going to connect for you.

Some data sources-- InfraWorks knows what that is. So in this case, it knows that it's terrain, and so I don't have to tell it it's terrain. In this case, it doesn't know where the terrain is. That coordinate system wasn't embedded into that file. So I'm going to have to come in here and I'm going to have to assign a coordinate system. So if you notice the little yellow triangle with the exclamation point in it. It says hey, pay attention to this.

So I'm going to go ahead and assign this. So this is in Colorado, so I'm going to use the coordinate system CO83-NF. So Colorado, NAD83, StatePlane US Foot, right?

I close and refresh this, and it creates my terrain. Now, to be honest, I pared this data set way down, just for speed's sake, but you can do this with huge data sets. I did this for an entire city one time. I did it for the city of Denver. Took a little while, but I was able to do it.

And then I just continue to bring in my other data sets. So here, I've got some imagery. So this is a JP2 file. Again, I simply drag that into the model. This one picks up on everything. It actually had the coordinate system embedded into it. So I don't have to specify the coordinate system. I close and refresh, and now I'll see the imagery draped on top of the surface.

Finally, I have some roads. So I want to bring the roads in. Again, this is just a shapefile. It's a .shp. So if you guys aren't familiar with shape files, if you get just a .shp file, you've gotten a piece of a shape file. You need all those other files with it as well. Just the .shp file won't work for you.

So I've got a shape file. I drag the .shp file into the model. And again, it's going to connect to that data.

In this example, it doesn't know what the shape file is. It doesn't know if it's roads. It doesn't know if it's water. It doesn't know if it's streams or railways-- it doesn't know. So I'm going to have to tell it what type of data it is.

So you can see up here that the type is set to empty. It doesn't know. So I simply come in here and tell it what it is. So in this case, this is going to be roads.

How do you want the roads to look? Well, I'm going to assign a style to it. And I do that by hitting the little pencil icon there. So I hit the little pencil icon. It allows me to choose the style-- how do you want the roads to look?

You can set this up to, if you have specific data in the shape file, to match-- so for example, I can match the collectors and have them all have a certain style of road, et cetera. I'm going to keep it fairly simple here. I'm simply going to use sidewalks and green space.

Once again, I'll go ahead and close and refresh this, and you'll see we get an absolutely beautiful, perfect model here. No irony. No foreshadowing.

Hey, it actually worked this time. Oh, I picked the wrong file. [LAUGHS] It actually worked. I have seen this sometimes-- and if I had picked the right file-- the roads actually dropped down to elevation zero. Sometimes when I do this, the roads end up at elevation zero. Sometimes it works just fine. If you end up with your roads being-- or whatever data source you're bringing in-- dropped down to elevation zero, simply configure the data source again.

So each time I've dragged things in, you'll notice I get data over here. So I'm going to just simply double click on my road. And one of the options, if you go to the Source tab, you can set it to Drape. So if your roads end up-- or whatever data source-- ends up down there at elevation zero, simply tell it to drape it on the surface, and you'll get a much better model. Oops, I didn't mess up.

And there it is-- my existing conditions. Now, like I said before, if you don't have GIS data, we can create a model simply by sending a request up to Autodesk and saying, hey, gather all of this data for me. And this is known as Model Builder. So I'm going to go back to the Home page. So I just hit the little Home icon there. This will take you back to the list of all of the models that you've already created. This is also where you would go if you want to create a new model. So just to show you what I did earlier, I simply went to the New button there. And I just click on New.

Great, it's not working.

Oh hey, look at that. Thank you. No internet. Let's try connecting that again. OK, there we go.

So I just simply gave it a name. I told it where to store it. And it created the model. I am going to need-- OK, I might have to double check that in there just a bit.

What I'm going to do now is-- I'm going to have to do this. So I'm going to go into the Model Builder. I might have to do this later. OK. I might have to sign into their Wi-Fi. No, you don't have to sign into the AU Wi-Fi. Do you? Is anybody else's working?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BRIAN HAILEY: Nobody else's working?

AUDIENCE: Do you have the cable here?

BRIAN HAILEY: I don't have a cable. I don't have the-- I didn't bring my docking station.

So you go to Model Builder. And you can basically go to Autodesk and say, hey, I want to request data. You zoom in on the area, and you say, hey, I want to get this area. And it's going to create the model for you. You basically say, draw a rectangle around the area.

And it's just like Google Maps. You zoom in on the area that you're interested in. This data that you get comes from-- if you get the terrain, it comes from the USGS. So it's a 30-meter-- I'm sorry, not a 30-meter, a 10-meter DEM. So you end up with about 10 or 30 feet between data points.

The imagery will come from Microsoft Bing. That's the same imagery you'll get if you connect to imagery via AutoCAD. And then everything else comes from OpenStreetMaps.org. So your roadways, your buildings, the railways, the waterways-- all of that information will come from Microsoft Bing.

So I've got-- here is the result of that. Sorry I can't show it to you here. If anybody gets their Wi-Fi back up and running, please let me know, just so I can-- I don't know if it's this room or what.

So this model was created using Model Builder. And then I'll be able to show you what it is that I get.

So it's basic information. So this is in Indiana. It's near Bainbridge, Indiana. Why did I choose Bainbridge, Indiana? I have no idea. I was doing a presentation in Indianapolis, and I was looking for some interesting terrain, and I came across this. And I thought, oh, I'm just going to run with that.

And so we've got this road running through here. So this road is running through here. It goes down through this gully and comes back over here. And what I want to do is I want to replace this road. It's not working for me. And so this is the project that I want to do.

But this is result that you get. So again, the streets, the water-- you see that stream running through the middle here. So my little stream there. That all came from the Model Builder.

So I've got the existing conditions modeled. What we're going to do now is we're going to come in here and we're going to start laying out the roads. So there's two different ways that we're going to lay out the roads. First, we can do it manually. Just go in, create the road, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, draw in your road, go in, adjust things, adjust elevations, and you're good to go.

The other option that we have is to use some optimization tools. So I've gone through and I've laid out horizontally where I went the road to go. But where does it go vertically? So I've got tools that allow me to optimize the profile. So it'll go through and say, based off of cost, where's the best elevations for this?

I can also do this for optimizing the entire corridor. So I know I need to start here, and I know I need to end here, but I don't know what the best path is. So the corridor optimization tools will help you identify that best path. And It'll go through, optimize both the horizontal path as well as the vertical aspect of it.

So let's go ahead and lay out a roadway manually here. So like I said, this is the road here that I want to replace. It's old, maybe. We need to increase capacity of this road, something along those lines. And so I'm going to come in here, and I just want to lay out my new road. I have a pretty good idea where the road needs to go. So I'm going to come over to the little highway, a little roadway-looking icon, and the create piece of it. And I'm going to create what's known as a component road.

So I click on Component Road. Over there on the right hand side, you'll see the assembly. So what type of assembly do you want this to use? What is the cross section of the road? So if I want to choose a different assembly, simply click on the name of the assembly, and I can choose any of the assemblies that are available here.

So for this particular project, I created a really simple assembly. I called it "Collector." So if I want to, I can simply click up here at the top, and I can filter this list for whatever assembly, if I know the name of it. So I just simply type "Collector." Oops. Helps if you spell it right. And there's my assembly. I double click on it, and it assigns that assembly to the new road.

I can also control the function as well as the design speed. So I can change this to a freeway, and you'll notice the design speed changed to 70 miles per hour. If I change this to a local road, the design speed is 25 miles per hour.

So this particular project-- I'm going to say this is a collector, and we're going to make this 40 miles per hour. I can always come in here and manually adjust the design speed if I needed to. But this is going to be set automatically when I choose the roadway type.

And then finally, down here at the bottom, I can choose how it is that I want to create this. So do I want to go PI-based, or do I want to go entity-based? So I pick a point. I pick the next point. It puts a line between there. I pick the next point. It puts a new line in there. And then it fills a curve between those two lines. So that's the PI-based.

The entity based is, I want to put in a line, then I want to put in the curve, then I want to put in the line, then I want to put in the curve-- those types of things. So that's the entity-based piece.

So I'm going to leave this as the PI-based. And I simply start drawing in my road. So I want to start, I don't know, about here. I pick a point, and I'm sketching in my road. So I don't know. I'll come over here somewhere. And then I want to come down here to the south a little bit. And what you'll notice is it's putting in a spiral-curve-spiral here for me.

So how many people design roads? How many people still use spirals? A few. How many people design roads and don't use spirals? Yeah, even more.

So I've heard that a lot of roadway design is moving away from spirals now. So if you don't want to put a spiral in there, you simply right click and change it from spiral-curve-spiral to curve. And now I'm simply putting a curve in here.

So I'm going to pick a point down about here. I'll come over here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to put a bridge over this gully here. Why? Because I wanted to show you how to put in a bridge, to be honest.

So I'm going to come across the gully here. And then I want to connect back into here, so I'll come up here. And then I want this to line up with an existing road. And then to end drawing in the road, you simply double click. Or if you accidentally clicked-- because you'll do this. You'll click on that last one, and you'll be like, ugh, I wanted it to end. You just hit Enter. That works as well.

And it puts in the road for me. And it makes the best guess at the profile, which, in my opinion, didn't do a very good job. It's just a wee bit of excavation. Well, it's countering all the fill over here.

So once you get the road in here, you can come in and start adjusting things. So I wasn't real precise on the curves and things like that. When you select the road, you'll see the grips, so to speak-- I don't know if they're actually called grips. I'm going to call them grips-- for your geometry.

So I can grab this grip over here by the PI, and I can adjust the PI. So maybe I want to pull this out here a little bit more. I can adjust that. I can adjust the curves. I can add additional PIs. You can simply right click on the road and add a curve.

And then once you're done making those changes, you just click off the road, and then the road will recalculate. So you don't have to recalculate every time you make a little change, like we had to do a few releases ago. So it saves up all of your changes, and then when you deselect the road, it then goes through and rebuilds the road for you.

If I want to do things elevation-wise-- as I'm looking down on the road, I see the horizontal edits. If I flip this more into perspective mode, you'll notice those horizontal grips go away, and I get the vertical grips. So I can come in here, and I can see my vertical information. See if I can find a better curve here. There we go.

So I can grab this PVI-- point of vertical intersection-- and I can change the elevation on it, or I can change the stationing on it. You can't do both at the same time. So I can't bring it up over here. It's either the horizontal or the vertical. So you just do one and then the other. So I can raise this up a little bit.

And when you're doing the vertical edits, the road always updates. It doesn't save up those edits.

But a lot of times, when we're doing the vertical edits, we want to see this in a profile. So if I right click on the road, I can show the profile view. So choose Show Profile View. And then down below, I can see the profile. And I can do the same type of thing down here. I can grab this PVI, and I can adjust it.

And what you'll notice is the roadway didn't rebuild. So it saves up your edit, if you're working in the profile view. So I don't know. I'm going to set this one over here, put that one over there. If I want to get rid of a PVI-- I don't need this one here. I can simply right click on a PVI, and I can remove it. So I can remove this one as well.

If I want to add in a PVI, I simply right click where I want the PVI, and I can Add PVI. So I can remove this one. I found this seems to work better-- just remove the PVIs and then add them in as you need them. It just-- I don't know. No, I don't want to recreate the road profile. So add the PVI, and it adds all that information in.

And it's saving up the edits. And the way you get it to rebuild is you simply move your mouse into the canvas, and then it will recalculate your changes for you.

That looks a little bit better. Maybe I've still got it a little bit more fill over here, but I'm going to pretend that that looks OK.

And now I want to put a bridge in here. So bridges in InfraWorks are really, really easy. You simply select the road, right click, and Add a Structure.

So InfraWorks has two different types of structures. It has bridges, and it has tunnels. Their behavior is pretty much identical. So I'm going to add a structure. I'm going to add a bridge. One time, I was doing a practice run through here. I accidentally chose tunnel, and I had a nice tunnel going over the river. It was cool.

So I pick where I want it to start, and then I pick where I want it to end, and it puts the bridge in there for me. And it uses some default settings. It uses calculations based off of bridge engineers' knowledge. This is not a designed bridge. Don't go out and build this bridge, please. This is just a preliminary, hey, let's put a bridge in here.

If you notice, the model is having to rebuild. So this can take some time. If I need to adjust the bridge, I simply grab those little bars at the end, and I can move them to a different station. And then, again, the bridge will recalculate.

To select the bridge, if you don't have it selected-- so if I grab the road, what you'll notice is I've selected the road. If I want to select the bridge, I select one of the piers. So I grab one of the piers. You can do this with the girders as well. So I grab one of them, and it selects the bridge.

I can also select the individual components. So I can select, say, for example, this particular pier here. Because this particular pier needs to be a different type of pier. So I select the pier, and I can come over here, and I can change the type of pier. So I click on the little icon there, and I can come over here, and I say, hey, I want this to be a flared column instead of the standard column. So I double click on the type, and it's going to apply that to that specific pier. Just that one pier. It doesn't do it to them all.

If I want to apply that to other piers, I simply right click on the one that I had, and I can apply this to all the piers, or to the next selection. So I'm going to choose All Piers, and now all of my piers will have that flared pier style assigned to it.

And like I said, you can do the same things with your girders. So if you select a girder, you're actually selecting the bridge. Select the girder again, you're now selecting the girder group, which is all the girders between the piers, or the pier and the abutment. If you select the girder again, you're now selecting that individual girder. So you can change them multiple different ways.

And then again, just like with the piers, you can right click and say Apply To. So you can apply it to the girder group, or you can apply it to all girders. Or you can even apply to the outside girders, because those outside girders need be a different type than the interior girders.

So that's laying things out manually. Once you get it laid out manually, you can go through and use the Profile Optimization Tool. So this will go through and optimize your profile. And again, this does it based off of cost. So this is going to be found underneath the Analyze tools. It looks like a little scale. I still don't get the InfraWorks icons. Is anybody with me on that? Yeah, theyre just-- it's like, seriously? What is up with the [? Qbert ?] button?

So I'm going to come over here to the Analyze tools, and I'm going to go into Profile Optimizations. Just right down here-- Profile Optimizations. It's going to ask me, which component road do you want to optimize? So I select the road. And then over there on the right, I go through the different settings.

So the design speed-- if you notice, it did pick up on the design speed from what I had assigned to the road. I can come in here and change it, if I want to, but I don't want to. I give it a new job description. And then you can choose the structure style. So I want to use this particular type of road. I want to use these things if I'm putting in bridges. I want to use that if I'm putting in tunnels. So when I click on bridge here, I can choose different options for my bridges.

I'm just going to leave them set to the default. And if I wanted to, I could simply go ahead and optimize it right now. But I'm not going to do that, because there's some settings that I want to double check first. Down here at the bottom-- you'd think Optimize It would be down at the bottom, and these settings would be above Optimize It.

But down here at the very bottom, you'll see a little thing called Advanced Settings. If I expand that out, this is where I have all my advanced settings. So the first one we're going to take a look at is the profile constraints. So what's the maximum grade that you can have on your road? What's the minimum distance that you want to see between your PVIs? Are there any PVIs that you need to maintain that elevation of?

I need to lock that PVI. Maybe we're going underneath an existing bridge, and I need to lock that PVI at that spot. So I can go through here, and I can adjust my profile constraints.

My quantity options-- do you have a spot where you're going to have a waste pit or a borrow pit? So I've got a hillside over here I don't mind tearing down to build my road, and I've got a ravine over there I don't mind filling in to waste for all that so I don't have to haul the dirt quite as far.

The construction rules-- I can choose whether or not I want to use bridges, whether or not I want to use tunnels. And then finally, I actually have the costs. So that very last option there is the construction and earthwork costs.

So if I click on Construction and Earthwork Costs link here, it opens it up, and I can come in here and adjust these numbers. So for example, right now, my excavation is set to $2.34 a cubic yard. So if I double click there, I can change that to whatever I need. Maybe in this particular area, the excavation is going to be a lot more expensive, because we've got a lot of rock. So I can go in here and start adjusting these numbers to help me optimize this profile.

And once I'm done, I click Optimize It. So you guys are aware, profile optimizations does take Cloud Credits. If you want to check to see how much it's going to cost you before you do this, you can click here to check how much Cloud Credits this is going to run you. So I'm going to go ahead and click here to check. And I still have network issues. But when I did this in the past, this was right at 100 Cloud Credits. Anybody know how much a Cloud Credit costs?

AUDIENCE: $1.

BRIAN HAILEY: $1. Yeah. So this will run you about $100. So I would reserve this particular tool for those really long roads that you need to go through and optimize. But it's there as an option for you, if you would like.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

BRIAN HAILEY: So the question is, if you're on subscription, you get Cloud Credits with subscription, and then those credits will be deducted from your account. Does that answer the question? OK.

Once you've done the optimization, which I can't do today, it's going to show up in your job monitor. So your job monitor shows you all the optimization jobs that you've done. So as you can see, I've done three different ones here. I've got a profile, and I did two different quarter optimizations, which we'll see here in just a bit.

If you want to see the results, you can just click on the report icon, and it will open up a PDF, or download a PDF, and you'll be able to see those results. Let's see if I can actually find my PDF. If I should have it available here. That's not it. There it is.

So this is what the report will look like. So it shows you your profile. It shows you the construction information, the typical cross-section. It shows you quite a bit of information, your mass haul information. Again, more hauling. Cross sections, typical stations.

It even shows you the pier for the bridge, which I think is cool. It shows you the volume report. And then last but not least is the legal reminder. So you've got to remember that lawyers will be involved if you do something.

And when you want to see the results, you'll simply click on the Create a Proposal to view the results in the model. And what this will do-- this will download a little IMX file. So IMX, that's what we use to transfer InfraWorks data back and forth between Civil 3D and other programs. And it'll create a new proposal, and it'll just a assign that elevations to your road for you.

So that's the profile optimization tools. And then we get to corridor optimization. And again, corridor optimization says, well, I can go from here to there. I don't really know what path I want to take. Why don't you help me figure this out?

So I've got a proposal here that I've set up to help me with this. And basically, what we do is, first of all, we need to specify the path. So let me go ahead and close out of the profile optimization tools here, close out of the job monitor. And so what I want to do is I want to start about here where the road intersection is, and I want to end about there. So I need to tell it, that's my path. The path is not the route. It's just the start and end point.

So I'm going to go into my corridor optimization tools. Every time you come into the corridor optimization tools, it is going to default to 65 miles per hour. So always make sure that you change this. If you're in the metric, I'm sure it defaults to a specific speed for metric too.

So I'm going to set this to 40 miles per hour. Again, I can choose the road style, the bridge style, the tunnel style. And then I need to have the path. You can have multiple paths in the model. This little pull-down here will show you all of the paths that you have. As you can see, I don't have any in this model. So I simply hit the green plus to the right there, and this allows me to create the path.

So where do I want to start? Well, I want to start-- I don't know. Not there. I want to start there. And where do I want it to end? Well, I want it to end there.

So I just picked those two points. Don't mind the little flashy things you saw there. I'll explain those in just a little bit-- that thing. Don't worry about it yet.

This is the path. If you're going to have multiple paths in the model, you probably want to name them. If you hit the Expand button just to the right of the green plus, this will show you all of the paths that you have. You can simply double click on it and rename it to whatever you like, just to help you organize your paths.

Again, I could simply hit Optimize It, and it will go through and optimize the file for me. But again, I have options. So down here at the bottom, I have my Advanced Settings.

And the first thing we have is this thing known as Cost Zones and Suitability Maps. Because there are spots in this model that are more expensive to build through than other spots, and I would much rather take the cheap route than the expensive route. So I can create a suitability map that says, these areas are cheap and these areas are expensive.

So let's go ahead and do that. So I'm going to open the suitability map. This is just a shortcut to it. There's access to it underneath the orange eye. So I just go ahead and open the suitability map. When you first create a model, it will have a suitability map already in it. I went ahead and deleted it, because I want to show you how to create one from scratch.

So I'm going to select a map. I don't have any maps, so I'm going to create a new map. And I'm just going to name this one. So I'm going to hit the little pencil sign right there, saying, hey, I want to edit this name. And I'm going to name this one "Corridor Optimization."

Now we can add layers to the suitability map. The layers come from your model explorer. So I'm simply going to add a layer. And in this case, what I want to add is the water area. So I've got that water area running through the middle. I want to try to avoid that as much as I can. I don't want the road to go along the water. That would be silly.

So I'm going to add that in. And the way I do that is by hitting the little filter icon. I don't know why that represents filters. It looks more like a funnel to me.

So I click the little filter icon. And then here is my model explorer. I'm just going to scroll down a bit here, and I'm going to toggle on the water areas.

There's no OK button here. You simply close it hitting the X. And you'll see that that has now been added in here.

Some options here-- I can put in a gradient width. So I've got my avoidance value right here at the edge of the water. And then over here, I'm not having an avoidance. So how far do you want to go to transition from the maximum avoidance to no avoidance? And so this is defaulting to 50 meters. I'm just going to run with that. I'll select OK.

It's now added, and then I can use this slider to adjust the avoidance weight, so to speak. So is it really, really expensive, or is it just kind of expensive? So I am going to leave this set to 50. I'm going to apply this. And we'll see the results here in just a minute.

The numbers-- I have no idea what they represent, other than that one is more expensive than the other. So if I set this to 50 versus 100, what does that do the calculations? I don't know. I've asked. I've searched. I haven't been able to find anything, other than it's more expensive. How much more? I don't know.

So here's a suitability map. And you can see that along the stream is where this particular model has the highest cost. Well, I've got some other things in here that I want to add in. Maybe I want to add some buildings in. And those are even more expensive, because I don't want to have to demolish a building to put this road in. Maybe I've got some archaeological sites. I really want to avoid those. So I can make those super, super expensive

One thing that I struggled with when I first started doing this is there's no way to tell this corridor optimization, I want you to start going that direction. All I'm saying is, I want you to start here, and I want you to end here. And it does it in a vacuum. It doesn't know, am I tying into an existing road?

So in this case, I definitely am. So I want to basically continue this road along to this point, and then I want you to basically continue there, and then go do whatever you need to do to get back to here, and then I want you to line up with this road up here. There's no setting in here anywhere that I've found that allows you to do that. If anybody finds one, please let me know.

So what I've done is I'm using this suitability map to force that alignment. And that's where those two little flashy things came into play. So if you notice, I have two coverage areas here-- one at the beginning and one at the end. And they have a little notch built out of them. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add these coverage areas to my suitability map as the most expensive piece. And that'll try to force it to go out the notch, and that will line up that initial road.

How do I get these added in? Because I might have thousands of coverage areas in this model, and I want to take just those two and add them to the suitability map. Well, the way we do that is we create a subset of our coverage areas.

I can't select this, because my corridor optimization tools are open. So let me go ahead and close the corridor optimization. I'm going to go ahead and select this coverage. In fact, I'm going to select both of them. So I just hold my Control key down. I can select the other one as well, so you can get a better idea of that notch.

And what I've done to these is I've simply added a value to the hard cost property. It doesn't matter which one you use. You just need to add something to a specific property that allows you to identify, these are the ones that I want to add to the suitability map.