Show notes
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…
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