How Autodesk’s 3D Design Tools Help Create Sustainable Cities

Before ground breaks on any sustainable infrastructure projects they first have to be imagined and designed. The design process is now more quick and efficient, thanks to software like Autodesk’s 3D design software. But how much impact can 3D design software have on sustainable cities and infrastructure?

I talked with Terry Bennett, Senior Industry Program Manager for Civil Engineering and Planning at Autodesk, an influential $2 billion design software corporation, to find out.

Bennett — who is also a council member on the Urban Land Institute’s Public Development & Infrastructure Council — discussed how Autodesk’s 3D modeling software makes it easier to create sustainable cities and infrastructure, by allowing designers to dream big while creating designs quickly, efficiently, and with more information about the design than ever before.

Read the interview below:

Smartplanet: Explain the significance of planning and design technology for sustainable cities?

Terry Bennett: The way we have to deal with infrastructure going forward is, there’s going to be no easy answers, so you have to be able to simulate multiple things at the same time, do multiple analysis, whether it’s cost, to carbon footprinting, to water footprinting, economic footprinting, whatever it may be. You want to put all those as parameters as part of the design. It’s that tweaking that minimizes all the environmental impact as well.

That’s where [Autodesk], over the last number of years, put a real emphasis in Building Information Modeling, BIM. Because BIM really is a integrated collaborative 3D modeling technology that allows everyone involved in the project to work from a model that they can share reliable information. It looks at it from planning through designing through construction.

Autodesk allows our customers to analyze existing infrastructure conditions, model some alternative sustainable solutions that they think would solve the problem, but more so be able to visualize and simulate the performance of that soon-to-be infrastructure.

The end result is that cross-disciplinary collaboration will help to reduce design errors, it avoids mistakes and conflicts in the field, increases productivity, and more importantly reduces the risk and liability of putting these big projects up in these confined urban environments.

SP: What tools has Autodesk developed specifically with sustainable design and infrastructure in mind?

TB: What we intend to help do is provide a link between intelligent design where the components of the design – whether it’s a building or a sewer and water pipe, or its a road network – have the ability to put in design parameters. If those design parameters are exceeded, either accidentally or through the nature of not paying attention to what was happening, it’ll flag you that there is something wrong.

A perfect example is a water pipe that tries to intersect – during the design – with a sewer pipe, it would immediately flag the designer that you’re too close. You have to be so many feet away horizontally and vertically so that there’s no contamination.

Really what it does is it puts intelligence behind the design rather than just plain lines, arcs, and circles.

If you have a roadway model and a building model sitting together you could run a sun analysis on it to see where the sun is at certain times of the day. For the building designer, that has a big impact on lighting and heat.