CadTools and xTurn (Vehicle Turning Software) Forum
CadTools General Category => Civil Corner => Topic started by: Apeiron on February 10, 2010, 12:27:52 PM
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Hello,
I'm interested to know what software is good to make some presentations for some projects (infrastructure projects ... roads, highways, tunnels, bridges rail roads).
Thanks in advance.
Apeiron
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What kind of presentation are you thinking about? Something like rendered pictures or animations?
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After I finish the design work at a tunnel ar a bridge I want to make one or more animated presentations with cars and peoples, but with my design plans offcourse.
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I have done something like that in Microstation. We are using Bentley software for design : MXROAD for road design and Powerdraft for drafting. Now we got license for Microstation and is very easy to make presentations because they are working on the same platform.
I made an animation also but its very large, about 300MB
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this a render with a terrain image overlay imported from google earth
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We us MXRoad too to design but also use Dynamite VSP software for visualisation, i highly recommend it cause it makes importing designs from MXRoad or Civil 3D very easy. Just a few clicks and your design is imported to 3DMax, also software is very easy to use,check it out at http://www.3am-solutions.com/
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We us MXRoad too to design but also use Dynamite VSP software for visualisation, i highly recommend it cause it makes importing designs from MXRoad or Civil 3D very easy. Just a few clicks and your design is imported to 3DMax, also software is very easy to use,check it out at http://www.3am-solutions.com/
Looks nice but it's not a standalone product, it requires 3dsmax. I wanted to ask you if it requires 3dsmax knowledge or can you do the job just by using it's own commands?
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I agree with you cr_paul and I'm sure you need to know 3dsmax and the Dynamite VSP, but the presentation look verry nice.
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I agree with you cr_paul and I'm sure you need to know 3dsmax and the Dynamite VSP, but the presentation look verry nice.
dynamite is damn nice! especially the road markings options . I have to work a lot to make them. :( . but the main advantage (for me !) in using microstation is that i don't need to buy and learn two more pieces of software. also microstation uses the directx api so I don't need a professional graphics card for rendering. a good gaming card is just enough and you don't have to spend even more money (I'm talking about a few thousand euros) to buy a firegl or quadro (opengl cards) like 3dsmax needs.
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Well, amount of knowledge needed in 3DMax to use Dynamite is really minimal, you don't use Max as you would without Dynamite, that would require really learning it and it will take ages to master it. Ofcourse you should know basic stuff, and that you can learn in matter of days. So 3Dmax is just a foundation for Dynamite to work, and 90% of work you do trough Dynamite menus and commands so it is easy to use, and that's what they had in mind, nobody want's to learn 2 softwares to do one thing. ;)
cr_raul, I like you work in Microstation, i try to use it more these days as i found out it's so much more advanced than AutoCAD but it is very hard to convert from 10 years of working in CAD to Microstation. And image handling is like 10000 years more advanced than CAD, i use up to 20 satellite images, 100 MB each, in drawing, CAD freezes up and loads them like a snail,takes 10-15 minutes to load drawing, Microstation is working like its nothing. ;D
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Well i forgot something that makes Dynamite fantastic tool, it updates your drawings instantly, if you change something in your Mx model , no problem, click update in Dynamite and your visualisation is up to date! 8)
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Yup, I used once 4 satellite images at once each of about 400mb and it worked well and I have a dell desktop with 1 gb of ram and integrated graphics ;D. Microstation is great for 3D design but for 2D design ACAD is far better. Microstation's main advantage in 3D design (in my opinion) is that you can orbit around the model quickly and precise unlike autocad and it has that sweet accudraw pointer and you can switch drawing planes swiftly with just one button. Plus you have a lot of options for surface and solid creation and since the latest build it incorporates a new rendering engine (from Luxology) that is very fast compared to the quality of images it outputs.
I don't think microstation is that hard to learn. I learned Nemetschek Allplan in college and when I started working in this company I had to learn ACAD and after one year they switched to bentley products and had to learn powerdraft and mxroad.
Anyway dynamite looks "explosive" :D but here ( in Romania) it's not a common thing to make visualization stuff for road projects so buying this kind of software it's just not feasible. So - in this conditions - Microstation is the best choice because it's actually a CAD environment with visualization modules (rendering, animation, complex shapes etc.) like a CAM software.
I'd love to work with this kind of software but ... try telling that to the managers >:(
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Well I wasn't refering to Microstation as a hard to learn, it's just hard to switch from CAD philosophy of working to MS after 10 years of "living and working" in CAD :) Some things become a reflex reaction, you don't think about commands anymore just do it. And advantages of MS are numerous, for example MS has such advanced selection options, while CAD just has those stupid square selection boxes,and in road drawings you just have millions of lines that are not easy to select with square only, but as I say I work in CAD and MS so , try to use best of both.
Visualization is the future, and we have more and more clients demanding it so we must adapt and dynamite is very cool.
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well even if I worked with acad for just one year when we switched to microstation I had the same problem and always typed "L" or "F" in microstation and staring at the monitor asking myself "well...something's wrong here !?!" :o I imagine for someone that has been doing this for ten years would be quite annoying , it sure was for me :D
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Hello to all you guys on the forum! I just finished a new presentation for a bridge and I want to share with you my work. Hope you like it and get some inspiration from it ;)
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And this is another type for the same bridge . There are three more types but they're all girder bridges and don't look that good .
How about we each post some of our work ? :) It would be great to trade tips for this kind of job :)
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Congratulations
Look verry nice
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Looks pretty good,so you did this in Microstation only or you used 3DMax or something else?
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Looks pretty good,so you did this in Microstation only or you used 3DMax or something else?
Only Microstation. It has a new rendering engine from Luxology (producers of modo) and it's a huge leap from the old microstation rendering engine.
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That's very impressive! Do you have any tip on books for visualization with Microstation (Civil earthwork). I'm thinking of doing some of my work in MS, InRoad/Railtrack works better on MS.
So far I've managed to drape a areal photo over a DTM, it's a bit hard to learn without any documentation other then the help file.
/Lars
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That's very impressive! Do you have any tip on books for visualization with Microstation (Civil earthwork). I'm thinking of doing some of my work in MS, InRoad/Railtrack works better on MS.
So far I've managed to drape a areal photo over a DTM, it's a bit hard to learn without any documentation other then the help file.
/Lars
hello Lars,
actually I have some documentation about the new luxology render module that it's not included in the help file but no documentation about doing visualization of civil works in MS. I learned by myself how to do it. I could give you some tips about the things I made.
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Hope you can fill me in on this. I'm draping a photo onto a surface from InRoads and my problem is that it gets more "blurry" then the original when draped. I'm using the dcdrape palette. I've even tried whit a complete flat surface with same result. So I'm trying to do the same in 3D studio max but I'm a complete beginner on that one to.
What is your experience on draping terrain with microstation? Is it a "dead end".
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Hope you can fill me in on this. I'm draping a photo onto a surface from InRoads and my problem is that it gets more "blurry" then the original when draped. I'm using the dcdrape palette. I've even tried whit a complete flat surface with same result. So I'm trying to do the same in 3D studio max but I'm a complete beginner on that one to.
What is your experience on draping terrain with microstation? Is it a "dead end".
Usually I work (well I used to work because now our subsidy is being closed and I'm unemployed :'( ) with something we call "photo simulation" like the images I've uploaded on the forum with the bridge. So I get the design drawings from the other departments and model the "whatever is to be modeled" in MS. Then I take the photos on site ,photomatch them and render the shot.
For terrain draping I used this method once :
http://communities.bentley.com/Wiki/view.aspx/Draping_photos_over_MicroStation_models
Another method I've been using is importing the terrain from Google Earth.
I usually use this method more often since I do this kind of work for the biding documentation and we don't have a surveyed model of that area.
When Microstation imports the terrain it captures the image overlay in gray shades(probably copyright stuff) so it's quite useless...but ;) when you import the terrain in MS you must capture the same area from within GE and then replace the black & white image with that captured from GE. It works very well. The picture "1VAR2mic.jpg" in the thread is made with this method.
The problem about the blurring is that when you render (raytrace or particle trace or whatever kind of rendering that uses illumination - it doesn't happen when you use the simple smooth rendering) a shot, the surface gets an "extra" portion of illumination so this changes the appearance of the image overlay. so you must set the properties of the draped material (in this case the aerial photo) so that it's light neutral (doesn't receive, reflect or refract light).
One more tip is to never try to modify the terrain imported from GE ! MS makes the draping automatically and if you modify the terrain mesh (or bspline surface) the association will be broken and you'll get the image applied on each face of the mesh...quite messy :D
I could send you an example but it's bigger than the upload limit on the forum so I must email it to you if you want.
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I followed your instructions and at a first glance it seems to work better now. Thanks a lot!
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i'm glad I could help you!
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I've uploaded on youtube an animation done with microstation. It's the redesign of a major intersection in Craiova City.
This is the link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h_ydADzQKc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h_ydADzQKc)
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That looks really great! No need for other visualization software than Microstation.
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thanks! But I think it could have been far better if I had the time and hardware needed. The scene is rendered in "smooth" style so there are no shadows, reflections and other light effects so the materials look awful, kinda like a coloured cardboard mockup . It took like 7-8 hours to render the animation with these settings and I did it on my laptop ;D. I will try these days to render a small part with raytracing ;)
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I worked some new renderings for the final design of the Craiova passage. This time I've done a far more detailed design and I hope I'll have the time animate it and this time raytrace it...maybe I'll throw some vehicles in there ...
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and part 2
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and the final one ...
haven't seen anyone else (but me) posting his presentations... ??? this was supposed to be quite a fun topic, it's not a hydraulic calculation topic ;D
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Dear Mr. Lars,
I went through your Cad tools and had been found very usefull and friendly to use.
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Dear Mr. Lars,
I went through the Cad Tools and had been found very usefull and friendly to use.
I found that the Contour need to be much Smooth then it's creating now. I can use almost all camand which you loded, but I always strugle when I use Alignment Profile/3d alignment.
Kindly suggest?
Regards:
Ashok Jalwal
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Hi!
You can smooth contours, read the helpfile, "How to smooth the contour lines" in the surface contours topic.
The profile 3D polyline is straight forward, it only projects a 3D polyline. To get best result you might need to simplify the polyline before profiling it. Use a tolerance setting of 0 while simplifying to remove irrelevant point information.
/Lars
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helllo there ! I uploaded some new presentation stuff on my youtube channel. I used cadtools on three of those presentations to build the passages. it would have been a dream if there was cadtools for microstation so I didn't have to switch beetween microstation and autocad ;D. but still many thanks to lars for this wonderfull tool - simple yet very productive!
http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/2/alzlSbwDq7c (http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/2/alzlSbwDq7c)
http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/4/OIHVbixS7cg (http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/4/OIHVbixS7cg)
http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/1/uYmQgWiYzug (http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/1/uYmQgWiYzug)
http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/3/v0dcLzgHQz8 (http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/3/v0dcLzgHQz8)
http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/0/lGP7v6SXl6Y (http://www.youtube.com/user/crgraul?feature=mhum#p/u/0/lGP7v6SXl6Y)
P.S.
all the elements on the last animation were made with cadtools and it actually represents the design stages when using cadtools. I showed this at the end of my presentation for my masters degree.
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I've put some new stuff on my youtube channel, a lighting simulation for a passage. I hope you like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar__q8HtUOE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar__q8HtUOE)
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Afraid I haven't worked in MicroStation for nearly a decade. My old firm rendered a flythrough of a road proposal back in the mid-90s using multiple 486 processors machines each taking a chunk. Took 21 hours, but what MS had built in was pretty impressive. They used EaglePoint to generate the 3D surfaces and then simply offset the centerline to an average drivers' eye level and rendered a flythrough to AVI. Couldn't have been any simpler.
Day to day CAD though, I'm a two finger command AutoCAD user. I might have some old static renders of a hospital parking lot if I look hard enough.
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I posted two new animations on my youtube channel, but still no posts from anyone else...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-RipZDYtg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-RipZDYtg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmk1-NyUOZk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmk1-NyUOZk)
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Really nice !!!!
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Yes, excellent fly-throughs. Still haven't found my static renders. They're certainly not here at home, maybe they're at work? Nothing to compare to your efforts though.
Basically we pulled them together to showoff the 3D byproduct of our process as a marketing tool. In my past 20 years of civil engineering, I can only think of one client that paid us to do a 3D rendering. Now it is all the rage for public meetings.
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@Lars
Thank you very much! Partly you made this possible because I use cadtools to create the guidlines from whom I create the passages. Basically the "skeleton" of every passage is made with cadtools.
@ eea123
Exactly! Only two of my animations were requested by the companies that made the designs. All the other were requested by the owner of the project (mostly local authorities) for public meetings or even election campains. And I have more of them that I haven't posted yet...
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wow, it's been a long time since I posted on this forum. Glad to see there are so many members and cadtools gained so many users.
well I did some new 3D work and would like to share it with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbwSU8QK4E (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbwSU8QK4E)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7txRJwBNNdI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7txRJwBNNdI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NNyQT9kN9o (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NNyQT9kN9o)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL0P22UVddc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL0P22UVddc)
p.s. still using cadtools in my 3D workflow ;) ... such a wonderful piece of software