In this episode Sam talks about what led him into civil engineering and then eventually in 3D visualization as part of public outreach.
Transcript:
Me and my brothers there were four of us close in age and we were each assigned one de facto and mine was Donatello and Donatello was the inventor of course. And so, I was the inventor and I wanted to grow up and be an inventor and so I told this to my dad and he said well in the real world inventors are engineers.
And so that kind of stuck with me as I grew up and as I started to get into college and take career aptitude tests. I quickly learned that engineering kind of would fit my personality at least that. I thought at that point and the aptitude tests pointed me in that direction and I really liked Legos Lego Mindstorms at the time.
I liked things like robotics. At least I liked imagining how they worked. I guess. I wasn't building them much myself other than the Lagos. And so I I headed to my mind that I was gonna grow up and be an engineer and eventually that evolved into being a mechanical engineer, so I went to school at UNLV and I was a couple years into study my studies as mechanical engineering and I went to.
Me with a counselor and they said that in Nevada if I wanted to stay in this area that I wanted to that there's not a lot of opportunities for mechanical engineers. And I had gotten married my wife's from Nevada as well and so we decided the council recommended that I should look into civil engineering and so I did that and I eventually switched my major into civil engineering.
And so fast forward to 2010 and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering. And. Up to this point I didn't really know what engineers did and growing up in my small town. I didn't know any engineers and so all I knew of engineering was kind of what my studies would at what I learned in my studies in school.
But one thing that became a big part of my studies was 3D modeling. So I started messing around with Sketchup. It was Google Sketchup at the time and then a friend got me into Revit which was part of the Autodesk Suite by that point and so I started playing around with 3D modeling and I really enjoyed it.
And so I would spend much of my time for school projects even even on presentation projects doing 3D modeling and trying associate it with my projects, for example, if I had to do some sort of calculations like let's say structural calculations. I would model the beam and I would model arrows and I would say what the answers were using the beginning of the arrows.
I would do modeling projects for other people if they were doing projects. For my senior design competition. They were building the Patsy Tillman Bridge the Hoover Dam bypass Bridge at the time and so we decided to make an officer observation deck for it and so I spent almost the entire project making a 3D model of the bridge and then of the deck and making renderings of it.
And did that for some of my friends that ended up beating us in the senior design competition? They were doing a bamboo orphanage a bam creek orphanage. Bamboo reinforced concrete I think is the way it's framed So I did some models about that would look like and they ended up beating us.
So I did all this modeling and I didn't stop to think of maybe I wasn't interested in the actual engineering and the calculus and all that stuff but I so I continued on the path of engineering I graduated right during the worst part of the recession was fortunate to get a job at Nevada Department of Transportation.
As a rotating engineer, there were hundreds of people that applied and they gave two positions out and I was one of them fortunately and so I had this. Wonderful opportunity to get an entry-level position with a department that had all sorts of options for civil engineers. And so as pretty excited about that the problem was I it wasn't long into that career path that I realized that engineering was about the farthest thing away from what I actually wanted to do.
The I'm a creative person and there were all these rules every time we had to do something you had to look it up in some manual somewhere or run some equation and it was just driving me crazy. And the cubicle life and all that stuff was just it was just absolutely driving me crazy.
And I I, Attributed it to me I thought there was something wrong with me and that I just needed to change myself and get over this and stay on this path that was gonna lead to stability for my growing family. I think I had one kid at the time.
And so, I I stayed I stayed with it and just kind of kept that to myself but one day one of my friends was in project management came to me and asked if I would make a rendering showing the potential conflicts of a gas line with some bridge peers in a project in Las Vegas.
He knew that. I had done some 3D modeling in college and Suicide you know could you just make something really simple. We got to show the gas line company that these this gas lines and conflict with these proposed bridge pairs and so I said yeah sure, you know, I'll see what I can do so I downloaded this program called InfraWorks that had been shown to me is I think it was called infrastructure modeler at the time downloaded this free 30D trial.
And went to work modeling this taking the design files and making this really crude modeling of what this these conflicts would be. So that he could take it to this meeting he took it to the meeting and a huge success, you know, they were able to communicate what they wanted they didn't really care how crude my 3D modeling was and so he told another one of his project managing but buddies about what I'd done that guy came.
Found me. He had a diverging diamond interchange a DDI which was I think it was the first one in Nevada at the time maybe the second one but those are still pretty new. It's a it's a whole different way for an interchange to work and there's a lot of confusion by the public because you're actually driving on their own say the road for a proportion.
And so they want to make sure that the the public understood what they were getting into before the project even was completed. And so I took that same program still within the 30 days took the design files and figured out how to make a really crude rendering of this diverging diamond interchange and again big hit especially considering the amount that they paid me for it which was easy essentially zero.
I was still rotating engineer which that program you don't have a lot of responsibility your goal your responsibility is to move from department division division and learn about what they do so that you can be better prepared to potentially even lead within the department. A lot of other agencies have programs similar to that.
So you have a lot of responsibility and so it's easy for me to say okay. I'm going to take this on and do it and everyone was excited about it. They were like, oh wow, this is great. This this road to date dating engineer is adding some value in this way.
And so I I like that I I for the first time working there for the first time I post college career. I wasn't looking at the clock all the time. I really enjoyed going to work and and so when these project managers when I'd be done, they would come back in the same way and that was amazing.
We used to pay $40,000 for this. And and I had done it in just a couple weeks and again, you know, I'm sure what they were paying for and what I was delivering there was a big gap there. But in my mind, I was like man, that's that's like as much as I make it a whole year.
And I just do that in a couple weeks. There's got to be some sort of company your business something some of it does this out there.
I didn't I didn't really spend a lot of time looking for who that would be but I did plant a seat in my mind that said someday. I'm going to leave the engineering world and I'm going to start a 3D visualization company. And so, this was probably about 2011 and I did have a family.
I think I by that point. I probably had two kids. And so, I knew I had a family that I needed to support I didn't want to be irresponsible and quit a job that I had just gone to school for for a lot of years. And, So I stuck it out.
I stick out the engineering path kind of dabbling in this this 3D visualization on the side. And I stuck it out with the department for three for three years total and then I left we were in Carson City, we wanted to move closer to home so we moved to Las Vegas and I worked for a consulting firm.
Private consulting firm for about a year. And this all culminated in 2014 when I received my PE license in in the way that works is you have to pass the PE test which I had done previously you can do that right after school and then you have to have four years of experience and so as soon as I had four years of experience I got my PE license.
I left the engineering consulting world. We moved to our small town where my wife and I are both from all within about a week and I started the 3D visualization firm that I had planned on starting about three years before.
And all this time, you know, those three years I wasn't just focusing on civil engineering. I was doing drafting. I was doing cat stuff. I was doing design stuff but I was I was making it was very clear that I wanted to do 3D visualization and a lot of my superiors a lot of people I worked with they they encouraged it they promoted it but there wasn't a structure in place to really make that work, you know, it's not it's it's a hard business model within.
Within any company which will get into deeper I think later on in this podcast but so that they encouraged me but there was like yeah, but you're hired to do engineering so do engineering, you know, and I get that like I'm a employer now and so I totally get that but it just kind of fueled my drive someone to leave and start my own company and so at some point in probably 2013 late 2013.
I was brainstorming on names there were a lot of different options that I had and I eventually came up with civil FX, which is the Coleman the combination. Of civil engineering and visual effects and if you've seen the logo it's the civil his gray it's like charcoal gray for a concrete and the FX is like green for like green screens and so I left I had a family we had just had our third kid at that point so I had this family we left moved out in the middle of nowhere had no income I tried to figure out how to do this on the side, but as always a conflict of interest with anywhere that I worked they wanted me to do visualization for them, which I get it, so I had to leave.
And we had no income and we moved into a very small living situation to make it as portable as possible and had some savings and we we did our best to survive for those few first few years. I had a couple projects lined up and looking back. I thought that if I could just do those projects everything would be great but those projects you know in hindsight they were small they all didn't work out and they just barely made enough for us to to survive and so civil effects in the early years was just me basically and a laptop.
And I had used infraworks I realized not too long into that that it wasn't getting me the quality that I wanted to give and so I got into Lumion which is a visualization engine for architects and then I'd use Sketchup for modeling and sometimes I do the sketch of myself, sometimes I would higher contractors to do it but the first couple years was basically that and and there wasn't even enough money for our family and so I did go work as a field engineer for a few months.
And and just kept trying to plug away at the at the Civil FX thing as much as I could and in 2014 kind of even before I had left the consulting world I started another I started podcast called I think I called it the civil FX podcast starting out this is the civil FX podcast where we bridge the gap between civil engineering and special effects with your host.
Sam Leidel. Eventually that evolved into beyond CAD you can you can still listen to all those episodes there is at least a hundred episodes out there available free to listen to and that that podcast is documents by journey and it's inconsistent. I think my biggest gap was over a year where I didn't record anything sometimes I was doing more than once a week, but it's a really good audio diary that's kind of what I ended up being of my first five or six years at Civil FX and I'll actually play a little bit of that podcast for you the the first one right here.
So you might be wondering why is this not just the project visualization podcast or why not the probe is podcast which I might use that on an interchangeably with project visualization because that's a lot of syllables to say all the time. But as I looked as I searched for names and terms to call this podcast project visualization, it's just too generic but when you type that into Google a lot of things come up about data visualization, you know, you'll see infographic type stuff where they take mass data and they you know, show it visually represented it can be charged or graphs or 3d or whatever.
So it just wasn't specific enough and so I really liked civil fx because that's what this is this is the special effects side of civil engineering, which is a quickly growing. Field right now and in one thing about that podcast is I documented the highs on the lows and some of them I was like man, I don't know if this is gonna serve if there's gonna work if I'm gonna survive I might have to throw in the towel and there were there were those out there listening that would email me and encourage me and that was very helpful and so in 2015 late 2015, we found out that I had been networking and trying to do everything I could and I've been asked to be part of the design bid.
Build bid for a project called project neon which was a lot of largest infrastructure project still is in Nevada's history project neon is the largest public works project and state of Nevada history and as a Nevada native that was a big deal for me. So we built several miles of highway local roadway improvements and so there were three teams competing and I'd asked to be on just one of those teams and I knew that you know, I had a one in three chance of getting this and being the visualization lead on this big project.
And so that's when I was working as a field engineer trying not to get my hopes up too much but eventually we learned in late 2015 that we had been selected as the design builder we were with the cue it atkins team and so that put us as the us Isaiah was me as a visualization lead it was me and some contractors that had been helping me along the way.
And one of the parts of this story, I got to rewind back to like 2012 probably. My then two-year-old son had been bugging me and and I just needed a few minutes I just need a little bit of a break and so I I said here I just found out Google the game for kids or something on a computer and put him on it and it was a wreck-it Ralph racing game browser-based and it was very basic but entertaining for a bit and that was like an aha moment for me because I realized that was you know, that was a transportation thing that's I mean, that's what we're doing is we're building roads and we're putting cars on them and and this this aha moment was kind of like what?
I can't we make our visualization interactive like that You know he was moving around this was some sort of go-kart racing game he was moving this car around and and so for all these years. I've been thinking about, you know, interactive visualization that's got to be there. I knew that architecture was training starting to get into that but transportation it was kind of a new thing.
So when I got project neon the budget was I felt big enough that we could just do the full thing interactive. All the all that they required was the flight for animations that the UConn, Transportation projects as part of public outreach. And so they were just requiring that but I said look if you guys will just take a chance on me I know that I am an unknown quantity and that we've never done a project this big and and I don't have much to show for a bit.
If you'll just let me take this budget make this whole thing interactive. I will deliver everything that's required of me and more. If you look in the past there has always been some sort of visualization of public outreach. The biggest goal of project neon was to make it interactive.
And we knew if we could do that if we could build a 3D realistic representation of the project that we could do a lot of other cool things. And they find it kind of thought I was crazy and That I probably thought that I couldn't pull it off and I think both of those weren't far from the truth, but we they said okay whatever do it, we will let you go ahead.
And so I went for it. And we did that. We took the unity 3D which is a game engine that developers used to make video games most often and visual experiences. And so we took it and we modeled this project existing and proposed in 3D we took the design files modeled it in proposed we made it so you could switch between existing proposed.
We made it so you could move anywhere on the project. We set up all these cameras. We had all the landscaping in there And we made a so you could render out of the application render up to 4K video so that we could give the project outreach team all the visuals that they wanted image or video.
And it was a great big success and it really changed the way people thought about visualization within the department and remember I had worked for the department and so a lot of these people I was working with they were former coworkers and their friends of mine. Now, I was working outside as a sub-consultant and so those relationships have been vital even to this day as part of civil back.
S And what? Able to do and so we we did project neon it didn't go perfectly there were some hiccups but eventually they were all extremely excited about what we had done. We set up touch screen kiosks in their private public outreach office, so they were able to. People were able to come in and interact with the 3D model.
And we did a virtual reality helicopter tour so you could put on a virtual reality headset and it's like you were sitting in the cockpit of helicopter flying over the project. People love that and we would go to the public meetings and we would do touch screens and virtual reality and we even did a driving simulator.
We took we took that 3D model and we made it as useful as possible for this outreach champion on project neon. And so it was such a success that they decided that eventually over time they decided that they wanted, you know, as many of their big projects with public outreach as possible to utilize this sort of interactive visualization.
And so with one fell swoop, we changed the dynamic of outreach for Nevada and I guess we helped change it. We didn't do it all by him by ourselves. And we also kind of developed a business model for ourselves, which is you know, we really get a lot of these end up projects.
They didn't say we're gonna give all these projects to civil effects obviously they have a system that they have to follow but we did end up getting a lot of their major projects and so now in 2020 that has been a big part of the business model that we've generated is doing interactive visualization for these end-opt projects.
And so over the years we've done dozens of these interactive projects Obviously we do not interactive projects we do fight through animations, we do photo composite renders. You can learn all about that at SILFX.com, but these interactive projects was kind of our bread and butter and that's where we learned so much because we go to all these public meetings we would meet the designers we would meet the public information officials, we'd meet the landscaping officials we'd meet politicians we'd meet news people and we would see what worked what didn't work in our technology began to evolve over.
Time. And in hopefully I think got better, you know traffic is a big part of transportation and so we started developing a better and better traffic system into this point. It's it's gotten very it's a smart traffic system where they stop it signaling intersections they merge. They can be aggressive.
They can do all these things. We can dial it up. We can dial it down. So that's been a big part of it. Our menu and our innocent interface our pinch to zoom all these things we just keep building the project after project to keep getting better and better.
And so we've started to do projects in other markets. We've done projects in California and Idaho and Colorado and Arizona and Alaska Maryland, Florida all. Over and so it's it started to grow. And along that along the way in the early days of project neon it was just me as the employee and then all these 1099 contractors so they went official employees.
But eventually about three years ago, I started to hire people as actual employees and I realized that I was up to that point wasn't building it wasn't anything bigger than me and I wanted to build something bigger than me. And so eventually, I started to hire some part time so I'm full-time W-2 employees.
And and that's when the team started to grow at a competitor. Lewisberger was in it's an engineering firm. They were they've since been acquired I think it's WSP. And they a lot of the end up people that I worked with they said, oh, you know, we had this other animation done by this guy at Lewis Berger and I would look at it and was way better than what I was doing.
And so I developed relationship with that artist and over time it became clear that if I wanted to get to where I wanted to be I needed to hire him. He was he was not just a consummate professional and a fantastic artist but he was my only competition in Nevada and so three years ago, I gave him an offer and he's been working for us ever since and his name is Wayne and you'll be hearing him a lot on this podcast.
He's fundamental to what we do.
In 2018, we opened an actual office up into that point he was just kind of remote workers. We did have small little offices but it wasn't really an office. So in 2018, we actually opened an office in Las Vegas. I still live out in the small town outside of Vegas but Wayne lived in Vegas and he wanted to build a team that he could manage and to do all these projects and so we we did that we hired more full-time artists and so now.
We're still in that office in Las Vegas we have ten more than ten full-time employees and it's been a wonderful ride and weighing in all these wonderful artists have been an incredible part of that. They as when they got involved the quality not just from a visual standpoint but also from a functionality standpoint that all started to continue to improve, you know, things like traffic system, you need to have developers, so we've had developers along the way.
And and so it's been wonderful but the the downside to all of this and if you'll go back and listen to those beyond camp podcasts and the dark days you'll notice that things aren't always great and they haven't always been great with the low effects and the reason that is is because it's a very inconsistent business model that we've set up.
I mean, it's just like anything else like maybe construction, you know, where it's seasonal or where it's whenever you have big projects it's it's really bad in that way. We have no recurring revenue and so we'll get slammed where we have all these projects and they're good paying and we were working around the clock.
And then we'll finish them all and then we'll just have months of nothing. And it's it's hard to you just trained all these artists they're doing a great job and then if you let them all off you're losing all that intellectual property and that so they're all these challenges associated with an inconsistent business model and and that's just I've been staring at the in the face for years now and in the early days it was it was just me and my family and then as we grew it was me and other people's families and and so that problem it doesn't.
Go away, it just scales and amplifies and and gets a little scary every time. And so, I always knew that product was better than services. You know, if you can have a especially a digital product something that scales nicely it's gonna be a better business model than services because you're not quite as attached your production to the revenue that you can generate and you can maybe even get into some sort of passive type business model or more passive at least on what we've been doing.
And so in the back of my mind I was always like how can I turn this into a software How could I turn this into a software And I had other people friends that we kind of asked me to sing question and I could never solve that because because there are specific challenges associated with what we do and why we need the manpower that we need to make these 3D models and make them look good and make them interactive and all the things we do and the biggest part was 3D modeling.
And that project in that software that I talked about way in the beginning of this is calling infrastructure modeler later it became infraworks. It was auto desks and if you don't know, Desk is like the biggest player in this industry they make they may call this software used for engineering for architecture for video games for visual effects on movies all sorts of things.
And they tried to solve this problem with infraworks and in my opinion, they've done a poor job because it was trying to assume what you wanted to model, you know, kind of make that up. And it just wasn't good enough. You needed someone actually to do the modeling and that always stumped me.
I was like if this billion dollar company can't solve this how can I as a small consulting for making any sort of software that can solve the same problem? And so it wasn't until the summer of 2019, so just six months ago or so that I was staring another slowdown I can forecast these things in the future now because I kind of know how this works.
And and I realized that a slowdown was coming up and I didn't know what to do and it made me think hard about civil effects in the future and what we're gonna do and my brother that is in this industry and you'll probably hear more about him or from him in the future, but it he kind of said hey, when are you gonna switch to this software?
As a software as a service or build some sort of software. And it clicked he eventually I don't know what it was but it finally clicked and it was the the thing that clicked was I don't have to build a 3D modeling program. All I have to build is a visualization engine and market it to people that are already doing the 3D modeling.
And it I know that sounds like so simple but that it changed everything. And so here we are. We have this three visualization studio. We are have lots of upcoming projects. We have lots of clients and I decide one day that we're gonna make software. And so, what do you do about that?
And I don't my are client services side. It's not it's not something I want to throw away because it's valuable. It generates revenue especially when we're busy and it's we have a wonderful team. We have wonderful technology but I did realize that we needed to start making a switch towards building software as well.
And so over the next couple of months, I started posting job posts for developers and started talking to investors and I said we are gonna do this. We're gonna make a visualization engine and there are visualization engines but they've either been marketed to they view either have been made for architecture firms or they haven't been made correctly in my opinion.
They've been too proprietary not high enough quality. And so I started talking to investors. I started talking to programmers. And fast-forward to today when now we have three full-time programmers that we just hired for this project to build the software. And it's gonna be called FX Vision. You can learn more about it at civil fx.com/vision20 and we are going to launch it in the year 2020, hopefully by the end of this year.
And so so that's where we are. We are and now we're just getting busy again with our client work. We just survived that slowdown. We're getting busy with our client work. And we are going to go down these dual paths of making wonderful experiences for our clients producing projects, like we have been for the last five and a half years and also building this software package that we can hopefully sell and someday generate reoccurring revenue.
And so I'm going to talk more about what this podcast is going to be like in future episodes but a big part of it is going to be that what that journey is going to be like that transition of okay, we've just been doing client services to okay now we're building software.
We're launching software can we get subscribers? What's this going to be like And also all of the time that we've spent at public meetings and working on public outreach. I've learned a lot I've made a lot of connections and I want to gather together as many of those individuals as I can for interviews public information officers, landscape, architects, project managers news individuals engineers interesting people team members within civil effects, and I want to make.
Specifically for those people that are. That are passionate and involved in making civil engineering projects look better either making them look better in the design or make bringing them to the best light kind of as part of the public outreach. And so I hope that that that whole background of my story gives kind of credence to where we're going and beyond CAD is that podcast that other podcasts and it was just kind of me behind him Mike but this is gonna be more produced.
It's gonna be a team effort. We're gonna have more voices involved literally and fear figuratively. One last thing I want to talk about is that we in 2019. I've gotten a lot of traction on LinkedIn and so in 2019. I started I was posting a lot of stuff about our traffic system and the project we're working on.
And all this stuff and I was contacted by a company called Epic and they said hey you should you're doing interesting things you should submit for a mega grant. And I said, okay what the hexamega grant and I looked into it and I'll tell the full story in the future, but if it has to do with Fortnite and this company has all this money.
Fortnite the makers of Fort I have all this money and they want to give it to developers. And and they had contacted me and so I submitted an application and about two months ago, we found out that we had received a mega grant and so that slowdown that I was talking about.
This mega rank kind of saved us. It was at the perfect timing and and we're gonna make a I don't want to spoil it but we're making an application a virtual reality application that will hopefully make our roads safer and hopefully even save lives. And so that's gonna be another part of this story is this mega grant process that we're going through how we receive this grant to make something to push technology to hopefully make our road safer and what that's like.
We never developed a fully fleshed out. Of virtual reality application You know we're a three visualization company and so it's tangentially related to what we do but we've never done something like this. And so, I'm gonna talk about that. And how that relates to the other two things that I talked about our client services and our push to make our own software.
And so beyond CAD was me sending me my microphone talking and I know that's kind of what this episode has been but I promise that we make civil engineering look good will be something like you've never heard. If you're in this industry, I think you'll hopefully agree that we need more of this.
We need more. Individuals that are passionate about this stuff sharing things and so you can reach out to me for right now you can email infowest of FX.com until we get more of our website or email and everything set up but I appreciate this and see you next episode.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
