Civil FX Feature – Rethinking 3D Visualization in Transportation

It is great to be part of the wider 3D visualization community and I’m especially excited about this feature I wrote for 3D Visualization World, one of the leading online magazines in our industry. I’ve included the first few paragraphs below but I recommend clicking through to the full article at 3D Vis World.

Rethinking 3D Visualization in Transportation and Other Civil Projects

By Sam Lytle on 3D Visualization World

 “Wow, this is incredible. You just saved me fifty grand.”

I was speechless. My first transportation animation wasn’t even that great and the entire office was pumped about it. Okay, animation isn’t exactly accurate as it was more of a ‘fly through’. I hadn’t yet figured out how to animate traffic so the video consisted of the camera flying through the various movements of the diverging diamond interchange. The modeling was rough, at best. The texturing was amateur. The terrain dropped off the edge of the world.

Yet someway, somehow, I had saved this project manager roughly $50,000 by doing this particular fly through video in-house, which had never been done before. This short video was used for months by the local news stations as part of the public outreach of the project. It was my first time using InfraWorks by Autodesk (then Infrastructure Modeler) and I had only burned through about half of the free 30-day trial (don’t worry Autodesk, we purchased several licenses later to justify the freemium work!)

I finished three projects for three project managers in that free 30-day trial, but more importantly, a seed was planted.

There was a deeper significance to that 50k figure to me. This amount was a significant more than I was making at the time, per year. I had a degree in civil engineering and although I had not yet received my license as a civil engineer, I was well on my way.

And yet there I was, producing more value in two weeks doing something I loved that I was going to make all year. The gears were seriously turning.

Finish reading the article by clicking this link to 3D Visualization World

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