These tutorials cover a broad range of topics covering key concepts in the use of Autodesk 3ds Max Design in the AEC community. Presented by Jamie Gwilliam of Autodesk.
Welcome to the 3am Solutions Civil Visualisation Community
The 3am Solutions Civil Visualisation Community is designed to allow you to stay current with the latest developments in the civil visualisation industry.
The primary aim of this site is to empower users of Dynamite VSP and associated technologies to share and contribute information to help
improve visualisation skills throughout the civil engineering design community. The community is open to all, although some areas of the site are restricted to
Dynamite VSP users holding valid software maintenance contracts.
Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM acquired by Autodesk
Today is a pivotal day here at 3AM Solutions – I have an important announcement to make.
As you may have already heard, Autodesk has today completed the acquisition of both Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM software products. For the next few months, the products will continue to be available as normal through our existing reseller channel. However, after this transition period they will no longer be available as standalone products under the 3AM Solutions brand.
Autodesk expects core technology from Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM to improve and accelerate the workflow between AutoCAD Civil 3D and Autodesk 3ds Max Design software products; giving civil engineers more powerful and tailored visualization and simulation capabilities. This will allow Autodesk to offer more efficient workflows for civil engineering visualisation projects. Existing users of Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM products are expected to benefit from Autodesk’s scale and research and development, providing exciting new opportunities for innovation and interoperability.
3AM Solutions itself is not being acquired, and will continue to operate as an independent business. However, we will be working with Autodesk to help the smooth integration of these products with 3ds Max Design. We will also continue to provide direct product support to our existing customers, honouring all existing annual maintenance contracts until they expire.
Autodesk’s plans are to improve and accelerate the workflow between AutoCAD Civil 3D and 3ds Max Design. However, they have no plans to drop support for any of the other civil design applications that Dynamite VSP currently supports.
I’m sure that this news will generate a few questions. Most of these should be answered in the more detailed documents which have been posted on the Autodesk and 3AM Solutions web sites:
I’d like to thank you all for your support, encouragement, wish lists, bug reports, and of course your business to date, and reiterate that 3AM Solutions is not going anywhere. We plan to continue our quest to develop great new products for the civil engineering industry, whilst working closely with Autodesk to further improve the capabilities of 3ds Max Design for civil engineers. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thanks to Dynamite VSP user Colin Hanford of Arup in Cardiff for providing this fantastic festive image. Great work Colin, it brought a smile to our faces here at 3AM Solutions.
We would like to wish all our customers and partners a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. See you in 2010!
Thanks to all who popped by the 3AM Solutions booth at Autodesk University in Las Vegas last week - it was great to put a face to many of the names I’ve become familiar with over the years. Also thanks particularly to all who attended the class I presented with Jack Strongitharm and Jamie Gwilliam of Autodesk. We presented a new dataset from Civil 3D which included some traffic data from VISSIM (thanks to Paul Brown and his colleagues at PB for helping us out with the data). The demo went through the process of incorporating design changes from Civil 3D into a Dynamite VSP based visualisation. Jamie Gwilliam then provided an excellent demonsration of how to create a realistic fly-through animation in 3ds Max Design. Well worth watching!
If you didn’t make it to Las Vegas this year, I have some great news for you. Those folks over at Autodesk University have just finished making all the classes from this year available online at au.autodesk.com. That means that if you missed our class, you can now watch it from the comfort of your own desk without the need to trawl through the very extensive Mandalay Bay Casino and Conference Center trying to find room “South Seas A” (it took me over an hour, btw!).
If you visit au.autodesk.com you can either search in the class list for Civil Engineering as the subject and Bruce Harfield as the presenter, or just go direct to the page for our class which you’ll find here.
I hope you find this useful. In the meantime, here are some pictures from the class, kindly provided by Ove Cervin from Autodesk in Sweden.
Autodesk has just announced the release of a hotfix for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2010, which will be of particular interest to Dynamite VSP users.
It fixes an issue which caused the new Sight Checker Tool in Dynamite VSP 4 to become unstable when rendering with Mental Ray. This hotfix is therefore an essential requirement for anybody using Dynamite VSP 4. Unfortunately, if you are using 3ds Max 2009 or 3ds Max Design 2009, you’ll need to upgrade to 2010 and install this hotfix to solve this issue.
To download this hotfix, visit one of the following links:
Other issues addressed in this hotfix include fixes for issues with stability and performance relating to Camera Maps, DirectX® Shader Material, double-byte file paths, InfoCenter, Material Editor, MAXScript, mental ray®, Non-Uniform Scale, ProCutter, Render Window, Vertex Color, and Viewport Performance.
Autodesk has announced the release of Service Pack 1 for 3ds Max 2010 and 3ds Max Design 2010.
This service pack includes nearly 30 fixes for issues relating to undo, performance, responsiveness, viewports, material workflow, and mental ray® software. Specific areas addressed are Biped, Bitmap Pager, Bitmap Proxies, Containers, Edit Poly, Interoperability, Licensing, Materials, mental ray, Particle Flow, Performance, Photometric Lights, ProOptimizer, Render To Texture (RTT), Rendering, UVW Unwrap, and Viewports. For more information, read the release notes.
To download this service pack, choose one of the following links:
Click here for 3ds Max 2010 sp1 32-bit Click here for 3ds Max 2010 sp1 64-bit Click here for 3ds Max Design 2010 sp1 32-bit Click here for 3ds Max Design 2010 sp1 64-bit
For those of you heading to Autodesk’s AU event in Las Vegas this year, look out for 3am Solutions in the exhibition hall and for the first time this year - in the Class Schedule itself.
Exhibition Hall
For the third year running, we will be attending AU this year, exhibiting on stand #617. You can’t miss us on your right hand side as you enter the hall (right next to the HP stand). To view a map of this year’s exhibition hall, click here.
Learn more about Dynamite VSP in the Civil 3D Powertrack
I’ll be co-hosting a class this year with with Jack Strongitharm of Autodesk. Our class forms part of the “Civil 3D Powertrack” at AU, and it’ll be called Producing Compelling Visualization for Civil Engineering Project Proposals. PowerTracks are a series of related classes where one class builds on the one before.
Here is the full official blurb on our class:
Jack Strongitharm of Autodesk and Bruce Harfield of 3AM Solutions will show you how to produce compelling visualizations for proposals and review boards.
Learn how to create high quality visualisations of Civil 3D projects, without the stress!
Learn the fundamentals of Dynamite VSP – a revolutionary, easy-to-use add-in for 3ds Max Design, targeted directly at Civil 3D users
Learn how to set up cameras, daylight, and render settings in 3ds Max Design to breathe new life into your visualisations
Learn how to change the design and visualisation at the same time
Learn how to extend your visualisation beyond images and videos
New to AU?
Each year, the Autodesk University (AU) User Conference and Exhibition brings together over 9000 Autodesk enthusiasts from around the world to learn, network, and celebrate the power of Autodesk technology and the international AU community.
As the largest gathering of Autodesk users, developers and partners, AU creates a unique setting where companies and institutions of all sizes can gain valuable information and learn strategies to help them thrive in today’s economy.
Autodesk University 2009 is your chance to meet with the top experts in your industry and learn about the latest trends and technologies that will help you stay competitive.
Listen to high-quality presentations about real-world projects and future applications.
Experience hands-on labs that advance your knowledge of Autodesk tools and techniques.
Share the professional expertise of the world’s top instructors, Autodesk developers, and industry experts.
Cultivate important business and professional contacts that can benefit your company and your career.
Meet with a community of your peers at a live event in a world-class venue.
Watch this short movie to find out what other AU attendees had to say about their AU experience.
Where Can I Learn More About This Event?
AU 2009 will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA between December 1-3, 2009.
You may have noticed that we’ve been offline for a few days, but after several late nights, too much coffee, and the appearance of a few new grey hairs - we can finally reveal what we’ve been up to lately.
Yes - to tie in with today’s launch of Dynamite VSP 4.0, we decided to give both our web sites something of a fresh look, and this is the result. We hope you like it!
We’ve also taken the opportunity to change the way that some of the content on this site is presented to you, with a view to making the site easier to navigate and allowing you (hopefully) to get much more out of the site. So, to summarise the changes:
Community site has been completely rebranded and renamed to The 3am Solutions Civil Visualisation Community.
The old Development Blog has become the “News” section, and has been given prominence on the new front page of the site.
A new Knowledgebase has been launched. Content is thin at the moment, but we hope to fill this with Dynamite VSP 4.0 related frequently asked questions as the product is rolled out across the userbase.
So, take a seat, grab a coffee and have a browse around. I’d be delighted to hear what you think about the changes.
Oh - and if you see any errors, dead links, pages that show the old site style, things that you think you should be able to access but can’t, or any other problems that you notice and think we need to know about - PLEASE let us know. Thanks!
Dynamite VSP is featured in another magazine article this month - the Spring 2009 issue of Experience Building Magazine which is available across Northern Europe.
In the words of Experience Building: “Greg Corks evaluates 3am Solution’s stunning civil engineering software for Autodesk’s 3ds Max Design. As projects develop, Dynamite VSP automatically reacts to changes in the design to enable the rapid delivery of high quality images and animations”.
About Experience Building Magazine
Experience Building is a quarterly magazine aimed at Autodesk’s AEC user community in Northern Europe. Produced by X3DMedia Ltd, Experience Building keeps Autodesk customers up to speed with the fast changing world of products, technology and community surrounding Digital Prototyping, AutoCAD®, Autodesk® Inventor™, Autodesk® AliasStudio™ and other industry leading solutions.
Congratulations from all of us at 3am Solutions to the AutoCAD Civil 3D User Group who held their first meeting last week in Oosterhout, The Netherlands.
Taking their inspiration from a visit to the Autodesk AU Conference last year, a core group of 7 Civil 3D users representing 5 different companies thought they could really make a difference to their industry in the Benelux by proposing some National Standards for localised Civil 3D components to the local Civil 3D user base. The plan was to make the components and standards available to all - free of charge.
The initiative turned out to be a huge success and should be an inspiration to us all. Over 60 people attended the meeting from companies all over Holland and Belgium - people that would consider each other as competitors in their usual day jobs.
By working together they have collectively managed to set up localised component libraries and naming standards that are likely to be adopted right across their region. The great thing about all this is that they decided not only to devise standards for Civil 3D - but to extend their scope of work to include Dynamite VSP. By defining national standards for DVSP road marking styles, rail object styles, and feature interpretation styles - they have put their entire local Civil 3D userbase in a position where Dynamite VSP based visualisations can be created almost instantly.
The user meeting was an extremely professional and well devised example of how to effectively communicate the benefits of standardisation to the masses. The core team of 7 Civil 3D users, looked at a range of tasks involved in taking a major project through Civil 3D from corridor design, drainage design, and tunnel design, right through to visualisation in Dynamite VSP.
Finally, I got up and showed a preview of new functionality in Dynamite VSP 4.0 - more news on that shortly….
Thanks for the invite guys and good luck with the User Group. Particular thanks to Remco Bastiaans of Oranjewoud (no they don’t produce beer!), who made such a great job of integrating Dynamite VSP into the recommended workflow.
Here are a few results of what the group achieved with Civil 3D and Dynamite VSP on the day:
I’ll be co-hosting a class this year with with Jack Strongitharm of Autodesk. Our class forms part of the “Civil 3D Powertrack” at AU, and it’ll be called Producing Compelling Visualization for Civil Engineering Project Proposals. PowerTracks are a series of related classes where one class builds on the one before. _-_Spring_2009.jpg)
Dynamite VSP is featured in another magazine article this month - the Spring 2009 issue of Experience Building Magazine which is available across Northern Europe.
The initiative turned out to be a huge success and should be an inspiration to us all. Over 60 people attended the meeting from companies all over Holland and Belgium - people that would consider each other as competitors in their usual day jobs. 
By working together they have collectively managed to set up localised component libraries and naming standards that are likely to be adopted right across their region. The great thing about all this is that they decided not only to devise standards for Civil 3D - but to extend their scope of work to include Dynamite VSP. By defining national standards for DVSP road marking styles, rail object styles, and feature interpretation styles - they have put their entire local Civil 3D userbase in a position where Dynamite VSP based visualisations can be created almost instantly.
