Over 900 million people around the globe live in sub-adequate housing that lacks necessary sanitation and water. By 2025, that number is expected to grow to 1.6 billion – a fifth of the world’s total population.

As any surveyor or field engineer knows, capturing existing field conditions for an infrastructure project or building renovation is a tedious, manual, often analog, and inaccurate process – not to mention dangerous.

Renovations projects are a particular challenge since the infrastructure or building may be decades old and designed before the age of digital blueprints. You’re almost guaranteed to start a project using static 2D image documentation of existing conditions. Verifying and updating these manually is a lot of leg work.

It’s hard to imagine a world without digital. But as you look around you, much of the physical world was designed and constructed using traditional 2D blueprints and is yet to be captured in a digital format. This creates a challenge for AEC professionals to incorporate these as-built designs into re-build or renovation projects.

Traditional imaging techniques like photogrammetry aided in this process by allowing engineers to piece together photographs of as-built conditions and weave in GPS coordinates to create interactive 3D models, see below:

Rich3D, GovDesignHub explain how they delivered complex helicopter and military vehicle 3D virtual training via a ubiquitous tool – an Adobe Acrobat document.

The U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy need highly interactive 3D tools to deliver complex animated virtual training and simulation environments for helicopter pilots, crane operators and other professionals. And government contractor Rich3D uses a variety of 3D design tools to develop and deploy the interactive training environments they need.

Bolstering the U.S. manufacturing sector is a message that has played into election campaign promises and White House administration policy for decades. The reality is a different story.

The Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) operates one of the most automated water systems in the U.S. But it wasn’t always that way.

LVVWD started life as an engineering firm responsible for designing a water system that delivered clean, affordable water to the people of Las Vegas. This huge endeavor involved the design of 250 miles of pipeline all of which had to be installed, constructed and inspected every year.

Sometimes the simplest explanation can save many hours of frustration.  That’s what we find when people move directly to a 3D environment without an introduction training.  It’s different. Sure, it’s still designing, and sometimes it makes manipulating your design a longer, more frustrating process as you learn on your own.  With that in mind, I have created this video so that you can understand how the rotation and movement of your designs work in the Autodesk 3D environment.  When you understand how something works, it makes it much easier to work with.

The importance of infrastructure modernization cannot be understated in today’s environment of aging roadways, bridges and transit systems. However, project life-cycle coordination has kept many state a local agencies from completing these projects on time and within budget due to the inflexible and ineffective nature of traditional paper-based methods.  Add in the complexity of balancing multiple-and sometimes conflicting – demands and priorities, and these projects an quickly become a headache.

Last week, Splashtop, a leading provider of remote desktop software solutions, announced a partnership with Autodesk to launch “Remote Desktop Streamer App” on the Autodesk Exchange Apps store for all Autodesk products.

Time lapse video has been used for decades to show the progress of some of the world’s most awe inspiring innovations – from Olympic stadiums to aircraft, ship building and more. Most recently the progress of New York City’s One World Trade Center has been captured via a construction site “job-cam”. The video spans the period from October, 2004 to September, 2013 and was hand-edited from hundreds of thousands of high-definition images captured of work at the site. Prominently featured is the rise of One World Trade Center.