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posted 07/13/07 by Jack Strongitharm Visualisation for Engineers

This week I had a request for some AVI's from Civil 3D.
I did not really have much to my kit bag.
The other thing in my mind is that I have been accepted to present a class at this years AU on Visualisation (Friday November 30th)

So maybe time to have a quick look at what I could do. As you have potentially read in this blog I have already written a couple of posts on creation of your design to suit render materials, setting up a camera etc. But to date nothing on the camera fly through.

It is not a big deal at all.

From your model just go to 'View' menu and 'Motion Path Animations'

Select a line you want to run your camera down (it should be a 3D one unless you want to look at nothing) and secondly you can select a point on your model to look at or another path to follow your eye to.

Then, choose the duration of the video on that path and you will see that it will calculate the number of frames you require.

Visual style, to begin with to test how it will look, you can choose a wireframe or realistic visual style. When we create the video, it can take a while if we go with the full render (like an hour). But choosing a CAD visual style it will take upto a minute. This then you can review the output before committing to tieing up your computer for an hour or so.

Choose the video type, WMV works fine for computer video, but if you want to use this video and add titles, put on a DVD etc, choose AVI. AVI is a much bigger file.

Finally resolution/video size. For test again use something small, but to be honest 640x480 is enough anyway for most uses.






Below is some output that I made this week with very little effort from the model I had already made or the Golf course I got from one of our partners in Sweden (Man and Machine, Thomas Nilsson).
Each photo links through to a seperate webpage with a flash video. The video is small in size and time so that they stream to your pc quickly.







My class at AU will go into detail on what we need as an engineer to create good visualisations with of course as little effort as possible. As engineers this is currently the last thing either our mind, or potentially the managers mind due to time and cost restraints. Dont forget though that we are designing a 3D model and just by viewing it in 3D, with a realistic style and a couple of 3D object blocks it can look very real in next to zero time.

This is until perceptions change and that really this is a very important part to any design work as you should experience your design before it is real (it is an Autodesk marketing slogan, but it totally correct). Also it can make the scheme happen as you need to prove to either client, public or planning departments the impact that the design has and on the surrounding area.

Jack Strongitharm

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