Greg Corke reports on a powerful tool for civil engineers that has the potential to revolutionise the role of design visualisation throughout the design phase.

Design visualisation is an established process in many architectural practices and a given for any large-scale development, but visualisation for road and rail civil engineering projects is still seen as a luxury by many.

Visualisation of the A26 in Northern Ireland, produced in Dynamite VSP. Image courtesy of Arup / DRD Roads Service, Northern Ireland.

While high-quality visuals are often put out to specialist third-party design viz bureaus for public exhibitions, when it comes to using visualisation to help drive decision-making in the design process, many engineering firms are reluctant to invest time and money. Being able to create realistic images and animations efficiently is a major challenge in itself, but then you are faced with the problem of how to protect your investment when design changes occur.

Dynamite VSP from 3am Solutions has been designed specifically to overcome these problems by providing civil engineers with the tools to turn complex 3D design data into accurate rendered images and animations quickly and easily. But, more importantly, as the project evolves and alignments and superelevations change, the visualisation can adapt itself to the new design automatically, so little or no rework is required on behalf of the user.

The software harnesses the power of 3ds Max Design, Autodesk’s dedicated design visualisation application, but uses a customised user interface aimed squarely at the civil engineer to provide easy access to the most important functions. This simplifies the process so that first time users are not scared off.

Dynamite VSP works with most 3D civil engineering applications including AutoCAD Civil 3D, MX Road, InRoads and Geopak and 12D Model. The most efficient partner application is arguably Civil 3D, because the software automatically recognises Civil 3D components by name and type and is able to automatically apply materials, textures and objects accordingly. With MX Road, for example, each user’s or organisations’ naming convention must be manually assigned, so careful planning is required to get the best results.

While Dynamite VSP will read in MX data directly into the system, Civil 3D users must first export their data to an intermediary VSP3D file. This is generated by a dedicated Civil 3D plug-in, which is available for free download from 3am Solutions’ web site.

The VSP3D file exporter for AutoCAD Civil 3D is free to download and is required to get data into Dynamite VSP.

One of the golden rules of visualisation is to keep data simple and import only the information you need so the use of a dedicated export plug-in for visualisation purposes also has its advantages as users can strip out unnecessary data at the export stage. For example, while the sub-surface construction of a road may have been modelled in Civil 3D, only the top surface of the road is generally required for the visualisation.

Textures and materials

Realistically mapping textures and materials in 3ds Max Design has traditionally been a time consuming task, but it becomes even more laborious when a design changes and it has to be done all over again. With Dynamite VSP, as the data is imported, it identifies linear features and can automatically apply texture maps and materials for road surfaces and kerbs so they appear realistic when rendered. These are taken directly from Dynamite VSP’s library so the user doesn’t have to get to grips with 3ds Max Design’s material editor if they don’t want to.

Style definitions

In addition to being able to map materials automatically, Dynamite VSP can also automate the placing of objects in a scene and give users control over the process.

To do this it uses ‘style definitions’ so when the user carries out an operation, they can save what they’ve done so it can be recreated instantly at a later date. For example, a camera path can be defined to follow an alignment, road markings generated to always appear on centrelines, or street furniture can line the side of the road at a specific offset.

Over time, the idea is that each organisation builds up a library of styles, which can be applied to different projects as and when required, with very little input required from the end user to populate a visualisation scene.

Most importantly, as all styles can be linked directly to imported Civil 3D carriageway features, if the design changes they will automatically update in relation to the new alignment.

Lighting columns, cars, cameras and signs can all be automatically placed relative to the geometry of the carriageway.

There are four main types of Styles in Dynamite VSP, with dedicated editors for each.

The Object Placement Style Editor can be used to place any type of object along or adjacent to the alignment. This includes lighting columns, signs, gantries, animated cars and cameras.

Cameras form the basis for any animation and while 3ds Max Design offers powerful tools for defining camera positions and paths, Dynamite VSP can define simple camera paths which immediately help users gain a better understanding of the model.

For example, an instruction could be defined which generates a camera 10m above the road and animates it to follow the centreline at a simulated speed of 60mph. This could then saved as a style so it can be repeated on any new stretch of road.

Object Placement styles can also be used to populate scenes with street furniture. For example, lighting columns can be inserted so they automatically follow the centreline of the carriageway at a defined offset and interval along the alignment. The software is intelligent enough to ensure that each bracket arm is placed perpendicular to the centreline.