Visualizing Civil Projects

For years architects and artists have teamed up to help their clients understand how the building they are designing will look upon completion. Civil projects often impact more people yet rarely do engineers or designers utilize visualization tools to convey the final aesthetic.

My good friend and colleague Steve Gabriel and I recently had the opportunity to share our work flow for getting Civil 3D data into 3Ds Max. We presented this video and our experiences at the annual WLIA conference.

First I started out on the Civil 3D side of things. I had existing contours for my site, a design alignment and an assembly (or typical cross-section). At first I thought LandXML was the way to go to export data into 3DsMax - however, when Steve imported the LandXML, file the final surface looked "choppy." Instead, we opted to export the Civil 3D contours as AutoCAD polylines at elevation. The smaller the contour interval in Civil 3D, the smoother the surface looked in Max.

The corridor also was not smooth using the LandXML. There was segmentation caused by the way frequency lines are used to create the corridor in Civil 3D. Instead, Steve used my alignment and assembly to re-extrude the cross-section along the road. The result was the smooth, fluid looking corridor that you can see in the video and image above.

Steve created the bridge in base Autocad using 3D solid primitives for the piers, decking, and cables. After inserting the bridge in the correct location in Max he was ready to make it realistic.

Next, Steve did his magic in 3Ds Max. He applied materials, added lighting and inserted entourage items such as trees and water. After the scene was set up, Steve used Max to create several animations. He created a construction timeline animation and an animation showing what it would be like to cross the bridge in a vehicle. The final animation for the presentation took more than 30 hours of processing time on the MasterGraphics render farm.

After several animations and renderings were completed, Steve took the project into Combustion for some final touches. Here he stitched together the animations and renderings into one, cohesive video.

Take a look at the fruits of our (mostly Steve's) labor in this WMV file here. (Requires Windows Media Player)

Enjoy!