You may recall in late 2017 Autodesk and Esri announced a partnership to build a bridge between their respective BIM and GIS technologies. Earlier this Spring we discussed what this means for government infrastructure design/build projects, most notably the ability to synthesize information from both BIM and GIS – with frictionless interoperability – to design in the context of the real world.
Throughout 2018, the two companies pledged to release more details on the impact of their new relationship on infrastructure software functionality, and we didn’t have to wait long!
The latest update to Autodesk InfraWorks includes one of the first product capabilities resulting from the alliance – the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS®. This new feature in Autodesk InfraWorks allows you to connect GIS data in a more seamless manner to your BIM design model in InfraWorks. With this capability, all attributes of the GIS data are added to the InfraWorks model, making the 3D context model much more intelligent, robust and accurate. You can see the data on the Stack when you select an asset, similar to the 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,” said Sarah Cunningham, Product Line Manager, Autodesk, in her blog about the latest updates to InfraWorks.
If you’re not an Esri ArcGIS user, Esri is inviting Autodesk customers to a special limited time offer to receive a complimentary subscription Esri ArcGIS Online for one year, which you can learn more about here.
New Updates Now Available to Subscribers
This and other updates are available to InfraWorks subscribers who benefit from new capabilities and improvements are they become available, which means more frequent releases and continuous product improvement throughout the year.
In addition to the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS update, subscribers also benefit from precision edits for profiles for improved road modeling, delayed model regeneration which reduces the number of times the model will update or regenerate while editing horizontal alignments and components, improvements to shared views, and enhanced BIM 360 document management. Read more about what’s new in InfraWorks.
