Infrasucks Strikes Again!

Infrasucks strikes again in failing to provide a sane easy to use program. Infrasucks is called Infraworks by Autodesk. In my latest encounter with this product it once again fails to deliver an experience that makes me want to use this product. Evidently Autodesk wants it’s users to be frustrated in the first 4 hours of using the product.

In this case, I have a coworker who I’m foolishing helping out to get access to Infrasucks and then if he has any questions try to help him out. The coworker brings in the model from Civil 3D and then I have to answer the obvious questions on why it’s so hard to do. Why Autodesk doesn’t care about interoperability? etc, etc.

Then the coworker determines a city furniture item doesn’t exist and he learns how to create his own 3D Model in AutoCAD Civil 2.5D (using AutoCAD 3D commands) and then exporting the model to FBX, including the materials. Everything is going great at this point.

Then Infrasucks gets in the way of itself. The user imports in the FBX model into Infrasucks and goes to verify the model is being imported correctly. But the model isn’t being brought in correctly. All of the Autodesk Materials are missing. What’s up with the that? There is no messages saying why Infrasucks is refusing to show the materials. It isn’t until you get out of the dialog box and then go back in a refresh the model do you get a message on what is broken.

Doing an internet search you’ll find numerous AKN articles saying Infrasucks doesn’t include Autodesk Materials.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/infraworks/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Materials-Library-missing-in-InfraWorks.html

In order to get the Materials to show you need to download and install a same year version of the Infrasucks you are using. But there is a problem, there is no branding to let you know what year version Infrasucks you are using.

So what product should I download?

Another issue is that I already have multiple versions Autodesk Material Library installed on the computer.

By math I have 2,643 MB of Autodesk Materials installed on my computer. Why do I need to install another Autodesk Material Library? Based on the install sizes, little to nothing has changed. Why do I have to install it again just to change the year? Are Autodesk programmers so inept they can’t subtract 1 from a number? Can’t they ask their coworkers where the default install location is?

If any Autodesk programmers are reading this you can find the folder of Materials here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials

I’ll leave it to you to learn how to get a list of folders in a folder (it’s really, really easy to do).

So I’ll continue to tell users they should call the product Infrasucks, especially since it’s been at least 4 years this problem has existed and Autodesk continues to make it hard for users to use the product.