The Autodesk® Civil Visualization Extension provides an easy-to-use, purpose-built design visualization workflow for civil engineers using Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design with AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software or other civil design applications.

With this extension, civil engineers can create high-quality visualizations of their projects, enabling them to validate designs through simulations and communicate design intent during planning, zoning, and public involvement meetings.

Even if they have little-to-no experience with 3ds Max Design, engineers using the Civil Visualization Extension can:

• Establish a direct link between AutoCAD Civil 3D and 3ds Max Design so that visualizations can be automatically updated as the design evolves
• Enhance realism of the visualization with civil engineering-specific materials and content such as signage, vehicles, and road striping
• Visualize realistic traffic simulations in context

In addition to significantly improving the workflow between 3ds Max Design and AutoCAD Civil 3D, the Civil Visualization Extension also enables 3ds Max Design users to create visualizations from a range of civil engineering design file formats, including Bentley® MXROAD, Bentley® InRoads®, GENIO and Bentley® Geopak, along with 12D and LandXML.

• Supports a range of industry standard data file formats such as LandXML, Genio and 12D Ascii. Dynamic source file links ensure that design changes are incorporated into visualizations instantly.
• The use of dependencies means that objects such as bridges, road markings, street furniture & animated vehicles are updated instantly when a design change occurs in a linked engineering data file.
• Fully automated material assignment ensures that visualization models can be developed rapidly without the need for a full understanding of the 3ds max materials editor.
• A comprehensive style driven workflow means that frequently used commands can be rapidly re-applied or updated instantly.
• A powerful style based object placement tool means that thousands of objects such as street furniture, signs, trees, and animated vehicles can be rapidly generated.
• A powerful style based parametric swept object tool can be used to loft fully textured bridge, highway or tunnel profiles along one or more parent strings or alignments.
• Parametric road marking generator uses fully managed opacity mapping techniques to rapidly generate optimized road marking lines, chevrons and marking symbols such as arrows and text.
• Populate visualizations instantly by automatically associating Dynamite VSP object geometry with design strings and alignments as an integral part of the data import process.