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.
Anyone Noticed Some Changes Around Here?
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!
Visual Explosion with Dynamite VSP
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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.
More Information
Civil 3D User Group Benelux Gets Underway
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:
Focus on Scott Wilson
Learn how global consultancy group Scott Wilson have been using 3ds Max Design and Dynamite VSP to help their clients visualise projects and their impact on the environment.
Based in Northern Ireland, Scott Wilson have been Dynamite VSP users since early 2008.
Look out for us in AEC Magazine
If you are UK based, look out for a full review of Dynamite VSP in the March/April 2009 edition of AEC Magazine which should be hitting the streets about now.
In a detailed three page review, AEC Magazine Managing Editor Greg Corke concludes: “Dynamite VSP is one of the most impressive products I have seen for a while. It’s certainly niche, but the way in which it takes a complex process and simplifies it by adapting itself to any design is incredibly clever.”
Congratulations to Dynamite VSP users Arup from Cardiff in Wales, who managed to bag the front cover. Image courtesy of Arup / DRD Roads Service, Northern Ireland.
More information: http://www.cadserver.co.uk/
New 3ds Max Design Quick Tutorials
I’d like to thank Jamie Gwilliam of Autodesk for preparing a new series of tutorials that have just gone live on this site.
This latest series of tutorials concentrates on some key concepts in 3ds Max Design, and are tailored specifically for those working in the AEC Industry. All Dynamite VSP users should take some time out to view these tutorials - you will undoubtedly improve your knowledge of 3ds Max Design, there is some great stuff here.
The tutorials cover a broad range of topics including daylight analysis, speeding up rendering using Mental Ray proxies, and how to make better more believeable camera moves to name a few.
There is over 1 hour of new content to view and we hope that these tutorials will aid you in some way.
Thanks once again to Jamie for taking the trouble to produce these tutorials. Feel free to add some comments to this page if you have any ideas for new tutorials from Jamie that would help you to get more out of 3ds Max Design.
These new tutorials can be found here.
A new year, and a new release - v3.7
Firstly I’d like to wish all our customers and partners a happy and prosperous new year. It looks like 2009 will be a challenging year economically for many businesses, which makes it more important than ever to maintain a strong commercial advantage in the civil design marketplace.
This can be achieved in many ways – perhaps by striving for greater efficiency, or as many businesses are starting to realise - by providing unique and groundbreaking value-added services to your clients that your competitors just can’t match.
It’s obvious that visualisation is a huge growth market in the civil engineering industry right now as more and more consultants see it as a way to differentiate their services from the competition. Ever more important environmental considerations are also making visualisation techniques essential to enable engineers to study their proposals in far more detail before they start building.
We’ve got a major new release of Dynamite VSP planned for the first few months of 2009 and we know that it will help in all of these areas. The release will feature some revolutionary new functionality, with the underlying aim of the product remaining to help you generate high quality civil visualisations as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Whilst we continue to work on this new release, we also wanted to pick up as much of your feedback as possible received through the community site in the latter months of 2008. I’m therefore delighted to announce that your feedback has led directly to yet another new release of Dynamite VSP, which is available immediately - Dynamite VSP 3.7.
Dynamite VSP Version 3.7 has been born solely from comments received from you - our valued user community, and we’d like to thank you all once again for your continuing feedback and support. We really do try to listen to what our users are saying, and without your comments I firmly believe that the product wouldn’t be what it is today.
So as we all settle down to some new challenges in 2009, I hope that we can provide as much help to you as possible - by continuing to fulfill our aim to provide the best civil visualisation software possible.
That’s it for now – all the best!
AUGI Design Academy
I just wanted to post a quick reminder about next weeks AUGI Design Academy at the Hammersmith Novotel in London.
It’s an Autodesk user event over two days, with around 300-400 people expected to attend. The dates are Thursday 25th and Friday 26th September - just one week away.
3am Solutions are exhibiting at the AUGI Beer Bust on Thursday evening, and some time ago I put my hand up to present a class on Dynamite VSP 3.6 and 3ds Max Design 2009 for Civil 3D users. I have compiled a list of classes that might be of interest, but there are also many others available:
- High End Visualisation for Civil 3D 2009 users with Dynamite VSP 3.6 and 3ds Max Design 2009 - Bruce Harfield
- Exposure in Autodesk® 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design - Norbert Graeser
- Creating Corridor Models for Carriageways and Incorporating Widening Areas Such as Bus Lanes – Carl Alford
- Essential Tips and Techniques for Design Visualization with 3ds MAX 2009 - Norbert Graeser
- Dynamic Civil 3D Blocks – Jack Strongitharm
For further details and to register, visit the AUGI web site.
See you in London!
Elephant & Castle
Ever wondered where the inspiration came from for the Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM CDROM sleeves? Well, according to the designer of these sleeves - Rick LeCoat of Shark Attack:
“When Shark Attack designed the packaging for software development company 3am Solutions’ Autodesk 3ds Max add-on Dynamite VSP 2 years ago, the client was happy enough to call the studio back in to design 3am’s new product, Dynamite SIM.”
“The two products are both aimed squarely at CAD designers working in the area of civil design — creating complex road structures and the like. As such, you might be interested to learn that the ‘double circle’ logo was based loosely upon the Elephant & Castle roundabout system in south London.”
Shark Attack have also worked on album covers for Dire Straits, Elton John and Incognito. If you’d like to know more about Rick’s work, visit www.sharkattack.co.uk.
Announcing Dynamite VSP Version 3.6
Well, it’s taken a little longer than anticipated, but we are finally able to confirm the imminent release of Dynamite VSP Version 3.6.
Including greatly improved support for Civil 3D 2009, and a range of other improvements driven by you - our community members, Dynamite VSP Version 3.6 will be available from Monday 18th August 2008 as a downloadable service pack. The service pack (SP4) may be applied to Version 3.1, Version 3.5, or Version 3.51.
I’d like to thank everyone for all the valuable feedback that we have received via this site - hopefully you’ll see that lots of your comments have been incorporated into this release. For the ones that didn’t make it this time, please be assured that all comments are still somewhere 
on the development plan for future inclusion.
We hope to post an AVI later detailing some of the main improvements in this release, but in the meantime here is a link to the full release notes which were posted to the main 3am Solutions web site today.
Dynamite VSP Version 3.6 will use the same licence key as Version 3.51. If you plan to upgrade from any earlier version of Dynamite VSP, a licence file update will be required. Updated licence files are available from 3am Solutions on request to users holding valid annual maintenance contracts.