By Luke Howells
Barriers and Fences
In InfraWorks Barriers are not only Barriers, we can use this tool for a multitude of scenarios but the most common is creating Fencing. This paper will show you how to create new Material Styles and Barrier/Fence Styles.
It all starts with a High-Quality image of the style you want to design. We will be using a traditional garden fence panel with gravel board.
We need to crop the image to show only a single fence post and remove the white background so that the area above the wooden panel is transparent.
It is key that the right image format is saved otherwise the transparent background will become white again.
To do this I used a free piece of software call Paint.net and saved the image as a .png.
Now that the image is prepared we can enter InfraWorks to create our new Styles. This will all be done on the Style Palette.
Before we can create our Fence Style we need to create a Material from the Image we prepared. Select the Material Tab on the Style Palette and click the ‘+’ icon at the bottom to open the material window.
When defining the new material Select Texture from the Type options and use the ‘3 dots’ to navigate to you Fence image.
Set the Width and Height variables of the Fence Panel then press ok.
Name your new Material on the Style Palette and move to the Barriers Tab.
On the Barrier tab it is advised that you make a new catalogue to store your custom styles. This is done by using the ‘+’ icon at the TOP of the Styles Palette.
Once we have a new catalogue we can make the new Fence Style. As with the Material use the ‘+’ icon at the BOTTOM of the Style Palette.
Configure the Barrier (Fence). Set the Length, Height, Thickness and Spacing.
When defining the Materials, Left and Right should be set to the New Material Style we have just made.
For this example the Fence Panel is lower then the post and has a transparent section, to match this we need to set a transparent Top Material. This is achieved by setting the Apha Chanel on the colour window to ‘0’.
The Beginning and End Materials should match the Fence Post and Fence Panel colours.
Click OK and rename the new Barrier (Fence) Style.
All that is left now is to try out our new style.
Create a new Barrier and select the new fence style.