3am Solutions Online Community Discussion Forum

Manually placing civil view objects from the create menu

2012-04-11T20:39:09+00:00

Hi I am wondering if I am going about manually placing civil view objects wrong. I am attached a few screen shots to hopefully explain it better. When I go to the create tab, civil view pull down and place objects manually, they do not have materials assigned to them. Also if i manually place civil view materials to the objects they look correct, however they still show up under non-civil view objects. They also do not show up under in the placed object manager so I cannot add a parent surface to any of the objects. Is this something that is not intended with the create civil view object tools? Or am I just going about this wrong? Thanks in advance for the help.

civil view 2012 export failed to create data structures

2012-04-24T04:36:30+00:00

Trying to export to Civil View from C3D 2012 (64).
Error message: failed to create data structures.
Object: Road 5 Corridor in this DWG:

https://360.autodesk.com/Public/Details?hash=In7aI8T

Help!
Why does Road 5 Corridor not export to Civil View?

Thx.
Kevin.

Convert to Vray-materials

2012-03-23T12:49:08+00:00

Is there smart way to convert the Arch & Design-materials, that Civil View use, to some other standard such as Vray materials or Standard materials?
Or more specific; I want to change the materials “forever”, everytime I create something new with Civil View I want a Vray material to be used.

Is there like a Material-file I can configure somewhere, or are all materials created “on the fly” by Civil View?
If they are created “on the fly” I guess the best way is to have a set of Vray materials prepared that have the same name as the one Civil View creates.

Preparing and seeding complex models in MX to bring into Civil View

2012-03-29T20:53:47+00:00

I’ve been tasked with “visualising” two fairly complex interchanges we are currently designing (actually, one is already under construction). I’m an intermediate MX user but am a complete novice at Civil View - the last time we did a viz was back in 2008 (I know, slap me on the wrist…)!

I crawled the web and found a few clips on youtube as well as spotted a few stills of some visualisations produced for some complex roadways - so I figure there must be a way to do it somehow. My problem comes in that most of the tutorials I’ve watched/read all deal with simple roads - nothing really with long bridge spans and ramp diverges and merges, etc.

So the question is - how do I create my composite model in MX to seed the triangles when the boundary is quite complex. In fact, I could only get by with splitting the one interchange into 4 boundaries whilst the most complex interchange required 7! As such I have one design triangulation model with 4 or 7 triangulations strings in it. Am I going about it in the wrong way or is there another way to do it? Can MX’s auto-boundary tool handle this?

I’m at your mercy so any help/guidance would be much appreciated!

Chris

Autodesk Civil View 2013 Announced

2012-03-28T09:38:59+00:00

Autodesk yesterday announced the forthcoming release of 3ds Max 2013, and 3ds Max Design 2013 which will include Civil View functionality as part of the standard product for the first time ever!

Another important milestone for the product. More details here.

Draped Orthophoto not quite positioned correctly

2012-03-13T07:25:41+00:00

I aligned an image under my linework In CAD, exported a world file, then drapped it in MAX. it almost in the right position but is out of registration by about 50m. (on 6km site) what could be cause of such an error?

and how to edit the position to fix it?

Rail Materials in Project Resource Kit

2012-02-22T01:48:56+00:00

Hi Bruce et al,

I am trying to create some custom rail styles for fences and have added some jpg’s (with numeric prefix starting from 11) to the Private Resource KitMatLibsRailMaps directory. However, I cannot find a way to get Civil View to use any rail materials other than those in the Country Resource Kit unless I manually add a material channel (and then I am prompted for it to be added to the Country Resource Kit). Is it possible?

As a group of us share the Private Resource Kit over a network, it would be particularly useful if the rail style (.ros) could incorporate information on which resource kit materials are sourced from. Perhaps field 10 of the 5001-5003 option could be changed to a real number and the material channel be the whole number and the resource kit the first digit after the decimal place (ie 10.0 = channel 10, Country RK; 10.1 = Channel 10, Private RK; 10.2=Channel 10, Project RK). Just an idea.

Any advice on if there is an alternative to manually setting material channels would be appreciated.

Grant Stewart

Adjusting scale of civilview objects

2012-02-08T08:29:51+00:00

Is it possible to adjust the scale of objects placed via Civil View?

The default australian country kit front end loader is a tad small (7m x 2m x 2m ) and I was hoping to adjust it in the Civil View explorer, seeing as you can control rotation and similar position bits there.

I also tried manipulating scale via the 3ds Max trackview but the Civilview controller assigned to the object doesnt include scale.

My last resort will be to change the base .max file. That makes sense for a vehicle which should always be more realistically sized, but if there is a way to tweak it inside the civilview controls too that would be great in case I later deal with other objects that may require different sizes.

Thanks in advance.
Luke

Ground Texture on the civil view opening image

2012-02-18T16:37:29+00:00

I was just wondering on the opening civil view image was the ground textured with a draped image or was it textured with a material.

Multi lane assembly

2012-01-31T18:34:22+00:00

I have a quick question that I can’t seem to find the answer too… If I want to create a multi lane assembly, 2 lanes each direction, would my assembly have 4 subassemblies (one for each lane) so that when it’s imported into 3ds Max each lane receives it’s own texture or is there another method? When I normally create a multi lane assembly I would only have the total width of the lanes and not worry about individual lanes but since I am creating visualization material it really is important.

FYI…I have scoured the internet but all the tutorials I find have only 1 lane per direction so maybe someone could create a tutorial for this subject…I can’t be the only one with this question… can I!

Thanks in advance

Larry