The revitalization of U.S. infrastructure is once again a hot topic as the new White House administration pledges to invest in the nation’s roads, bridges and airports. Politics aside, it’s a timely imperative. Once again, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has ranked U.S. infrastructure at a D+ grading.

Today marks the release of Autodesk Revit 2018, and, as a member of the Autodesk AEC Bloggers Council, we’re proud to be first to bring you an overview of what’s new.

City and county infrastructure designers and civil engineers won’t want to miss this unique webinar series taking place every Tuesday through May 2017.

Join a host of familiar Autodesk faces as they walkthrough the phases of a challenging roadway project. From gathering data about the existing situation, producing a project concept, moving that concept to the detailed design phase, conducting additional analysis, and finally creating compelling visualizations to share with project stakeholders, including low cost virtual reality.

If you’re like most designers, engineers, or CAD managers, you probably rely on Windows Explorer and mapped network drives to manage and store project files. For instance, you may have one drive for design data, another for admin, another for permits, and so on. While it’s been the way you’ve done things for years, this habit of breaking your project up into pieces is a problematic approach that can result in misplaced data, poor version control, or deleted data due to incorrect file access control.

It’s no surprise that the practice of designing, building, and operating public sector buildings and infrastructure must change. As our built environments become increasingly complex, it’s vital that project team productivity and asset performance levels are addressed. According to KPMG, just a quarter of construction projects in the last three years came within 10% of their original deadlines.

Despite mandates, BIM adoption in government has lagged its private sector counterparts. However, new data shows that BIM is poised for greater adoption across agency design and construction projects, as well as into building operations.

Looking to improve the look of your Revit presentations? Revit includes some powerful out-of-the box graphic features such to render and make your drawings looks great. Many of these use non-Revit-like presentation techniques to help you develop your own artistic style.

Not using them yet? Check out this online session from Autodesk University in which Steven Shell, co-founder and chair of the Southern Arizona Revit Users Group offers tips, tricks and techniques for making your drawings look great.

Advanced Solutions' Tech Talks are educational webinars offered and hosted exclusively by one of our Autodesk Certified Instructors. Tech Talks cover a wide variety of topics for the architecture, engineering, construction, infrastructure, and manufacturing industries.  These one hour sessions take the technology beyond typical software instruction allowing users to streamline processes with simple enhancements and get the most out of their technology investment.

Check out Advanced Solutions’ upcoming Tech Talks.

The promise of the latest Facilities Management (FM) software is an exciting one of reduced asset and space management costs, increased productivity and a better-managed asset lifecycle.  One downside of implementing new technology is that it increases productivity in one area and exposes or exacerbates bottlenecks or gaps in data or processes in another.  Facilities management implementations have an Achilles’ heel called data.

If you’re in the business of airport design and engineering, you may want to check out this class from Autodesk University (now available on demand for free).

Presented by Creg Dieziger, a senior civil engineer designer with Morrison-Maierle and 28-year veteran in the civil engineering field.