Post by: Katie Andrews
The area of Springfield proved an attractive site for the
brewery due to its abundance of fresh water, largely undeveloped land, and
location close to the canal and railway networks. With the growth required by
the expanding brewery, the infrastructure and surrounding area developed to
cope with the demand, and has changed throughout the years. Terraced houses,
churches, and public houses were built to provide services and accommodation
for the workers, and the Great Western Railway extended a railway siding into
the site to provide even greater access.
Using Autodesk Infraworks 360, we have developed a site
model showing the current site layout and have imported the updated Revit
models. Infraworks 360 Model Builder takes site information from Google Earth and
creates site features to work with. Once this was created, we needed to import
the Revit models to show the buildings. The major problem we encountered was
the imported locations of models were incorrect. Both Revit and Infraworks use
imperial measurements as a standard, and even though the Revit models were
metric, they would still import as imperial. Whilst we could amend this to show
metric measurements, we would have to specify a latitude and longitude for each
building, and even this was not correct due to the specified Infraworks base
point not matching with a building edge. To rectify this, we opened up each
individual model, and made sure that the Project Base Point and Survey Points
are visible. Using the Location and Internet Mapping Service, we zoomed into
the site, clicking onto the building location as accurately as possible, giving
us longitude and latitude for the Project Address. From here we then moved the
Survey Point, which is given a coordinate linked to the Project Base Point, to
a specified corner of the building, as this location is what Infraworks uses to
locate the model. Then we had to create a new 3D view for export, with the
“navis” prefix as Infraworks does not recognise a 3D view without this. Before
export, we made sure the Project Units were also set to metres.
Within Infraworks, we imported the models as Revit files,
the status is set as Configured, but you cannot see the model. When we opened
the configuration options, the latitude and longitude boxes were filled, and
seemed to correlate with the correct site location. We found that by clicking
“Close & Refresh”, this refreshed the information and placed the model in
the specified Survey Point. However this
did not put the building in the correct rotation, so this needed to be manually
rotated to match the correct locations. This obviously brings in inaccuracies
into the model as the locations of the buildings are slightly off point. We are
yet to find a solution to this problem, and have additional detail to develop
onto the model, so hopefully through this we can discover a solution.
An additional problem we have encountered is the corruption
of data due to file sizes. Infraworks 360 constantly uploads the data to the
cloud as well as a local cached copy, but by using the Proposals feature, and
creating one model of all the information, this seemed too much for the program
to handle, and would create corrupt models. Due to time constraints and no
clear solution to solving this problem, we decided it would be most efficient to
create two models; one for present day, and one for the fully operational
brewery.
Further development of the models will include links to
photographs, interviews from previous workers, and animated walkthroughs of the
site. Please click this link to the current model development.
