Busting Myths about 3D Visualization in Transportation
It is always difficult and frustrating when you hear myths about your line of work that just simply aren’t true. In a new and involving industry like 3D visualization, misconceptions can probably just be expected.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t do something about them. In testing out a new format for creating original posts, I recently wrote a post titled “10 Myths about 3D Visualization in Transportation/Civil Engineering” specifically for LinkedIn. The good news is that you don’t need to have a LinkedIn account to view it. I always post consistently here at Civil FX but may be testing out writing for different platforms in addition to the content that I already create specifically on this website.
10 Myths about 3D Visualization (in Transportation/Civil Engineering)
10. It costs twice as much to produce two animation videos for my project as it does to produce one.
Because most of the cost of 3D visualization is in building the 3D model, producing the second video only costs a fraction of the first. If time is taken to build the project as completely as possible in 3D, that model can be used for countless video animation and still picture renders from many different angles.
9. ‘Simulation’ is the same as ‘Visualization’.
This one is tricky because I hear these two words used interchangeably often. Simulation is a computational model used to simulate data. A good example in transportation is traffic simulation which is when software such as Vissim uses traffic flows to ‘simulate’ traffic flow for a given section of highway or intersection. Visualization, on the other hand, is focused on what you see. You can have a visualization based on accurate data or even on traffic simulation, but the two are not the same.
8. If I need to create a project render I can just use AutoCAD. It has a render button, right?
While it is true that CAD software such as AutoCAD and Microstation have visualization capabilities built-in, these functions won’t give you the best results and often require specialized training to use. That said…
(You can read the rest of this post on LinkedIn by clicking here)