Friday Whetstone 7-10-2009

I still have 3DS Max Design on the brain. In fact, there is so much running through my head right now I can barely take a moment to think of what I could even write that would sound reasonably intelligent or coherent. 

The past few weeks I have been knee deep in building datasets in Max, Impression, Civil 3d and Navisworks that show some of what they can do for environmental engineering projects- especially water resources.

Stream in Impression:

Dam in Navisworks:

I anticipate that next week I will be building some demonstrations surrounding rivers and stormwater, and I am looking forward to switching gears back into some more hard core Civil 3D uses and workflows, which will give me more things to write about.

One of the things I've been preparing for is a webcast coming up next Tuesday, July 15, 2009 at 10AM PDT. It's called: Design Vis Series: Visualization for Transportation: Using Autodesk 3ds Max Design for Design Visualization and Collaboration. I'll be talking about why visualization is useful and important for civil projects, and demonstrating how to get data from Civil 3D into 3DS Max Design. I'll be showing how Dynamite VSP can help with that process as well.

I've uploaded a short clip to youtube that shows the dataset that I will be using. The first segment of the clip shows a very simple drive through that is created very quickly from Civil 3D data using Dynamite VSP. The "helicopter" fly over portions of the video have been supplemented with buildings, landscape, and mountains using some simple 3DS Max tools. (Special thanks to Jack and Marion for their work on this dataset and workflow.)

A few resources I have called upon in the past few weeks that have helped:

• Dynamite VSP Community- Tutorials, videos and more
• AU Class: From 3D to 4D: Using Autodesk® 3ds Max® and NavisWorks® to Take America's Largest Infrastructure Project into the Fourth Dimension
• AU Class: The Natural Look: Kinder and Gentler Rendering with Autodesk® Impression
• AU Class: Signature Styles and Entourage for Autodesk® Impression
• AU Class: Interactive 3D Visualization of a River Renaturation Measure

To learn about watching recorded AU classes, read this post:

Can anyone get classes at AU Online?