make animation of earthwork grading/staging. construction process

[wang890]

i have this thing that need to

1. put in some berms

2. put in some clay.

3. put in some more berm on top of that berm

4. put in some more clay.

5. at the same time need to excavate rock on southeastern side to build the berm

6. clay below some berm need to get dug out for foundation. that get throw inside some of the initial berms.

7. berm made from rock and on top is road.

see picture of this structure i am working on. it's very large. we are talking about total 10 million m3 earthwork.

i want to make a movie of these seeing moutain go down and things erecting. how difficult is it?

if i can do this i can make a lot more money. hehe.

most likly need some specialized software. i am sure some of you knows something about these. civil 3d and inroads is not good for these kinda of thing.

[Joe-Bouza]

I believe thats what Navisworks is for.

[wang890]

i've received one navisworks file before that is used for plantsite piping.

so are you saying it can do civil earthwork? i watched some videos on youtube just now, i saw some cool staging on building construction. not earthworks.

[Joe-Bouza]

I'm far from knowledgable, but being included in the IDSP lead me to believe all things civil can be staged in NW. But I am only guessing

[neilyj666]

Navisworks and 3ds Max are the tools for animations but I suspect there is rather more work involved to get something decent than the publicity videos suggest (as well as some fairly steep learning curves).

[craig_robertson]

Navis is definitely the way to go for this IMHO. It actually isn't too difficult to get an animation and then output a video, but it depends on how fancy you require the video to be. I have managed to produce simple build animations for retaining walls showing staging from OGL>Cut>foundation>Reinforced Wall>Cladding>features>reinstate earth. This provided invaluable insight into how I create my Civil 3D models and how I name layers and subassemblies. It also persuaded me that I need to investigate Navis further as previously I was leaning towards 3DS Max and Civil View.

[neilyj666]

This is interesting as I'm keen to do similar things with Navisworks; can you elaborate on the techniques you use and give a few bullet points as to the steps required or is there any useful material in the Web that you can point to?

[craig_robertson]

I actually found the easiest way was just playing around with it myself, I'd had a go doing fly throughs with surfaces but found I had to cut the surfaces up to be able to apply materials. The walls however worked nicely due to subassebly creation. The step process below is based on Navis Simulate and is really basic but it is a good way to start playing with navis, open a civ3d drawing in navis, to make things easy I took one wall and a clip of the surface.

1. Select the timeliner tab

2. Click add tasks and add every topmost item

3. edit your planned and end dates

4. go to simulate and press play

This is very basic like I said but it's a start and shows how navis takes civ items, i.e if you have tin surfaces on one layer it groups them as a whole. I'd then look into how you can configure task types etc to choose how the different tasks display etc.

[neilyj666]

Thanks for this

Have you produced any videos from Navisworks and if so what settings have you used. I do a lot of Infraworks flythroughs and have standard bitrate and fps settings that work well but any Navisworks stuff I've done has been terrible

[craig_robertson]

This is the stumbling point currently for me due to lack of knowledge/time spent looking into visual outputs and my current workstation and graphics card is not up to spec. I can't actually run InfraWorks.

I've had some luck with Navis exporting the animation using the settings shown with frames uncompressed. I haven't played around with the FPS, the videos I've produced have only been for internal use so far (they end up around 290MB). We have used the timeliner to output images for a presentation however.

[neilyj666]

Ok thanks - I'll investigate Navisworks a bit more....:)

[dgorsman]

For good quality output from Navisworks, don't go direct to AVI or other movie formats.  The CODECs have some built-in limitations on output file size and resolution.  Instead, render directly to frame (PNG works very well).

Timeliner may not be the *best* starting point for doing movies in Navisworks.  I would suggest starting with basic camera animation (its stupidly simple - create an animation container in the saved viewpoints; save viewpoints and drag them under the animation container; play animation).  From there procede to the Animator tools, which allow for both object and camera animation.  That can take a bit of getting used to.  It also has some tools for creating hotspot and other triggers to do various things as you dynamically navigate through the model.  These dont' work for rendering animation, so you have to manually get the timing right.  From there, you can assign Animator sequences to Timeliner tasks, which allows you to apply some real-world timing to the start-stop points of each animation while the Animator takes care of moving the camera and objects.  Really cool part is, you can move the viewpoint around to look at things from any angle while you adjust the current date.

And no, I don't have anything I can share.  Not exactly "national security" level, but our clients are fairly proprietary with their site information.

[neilyj666]

Thanks for this - just keen for any info on how to use Navisworks - it seems great for building work but not so much stuff on civil works

[craig_robertson]

For good quality output from Navisworks, don't go direct to AVI or other movie formats.  The CODECs have some built-in limitations on output file size and resolution.  Instead, render directly to frame (PNG works very well).

That's exactly how we created the timeline shots for our presentation, is there a way to take the render frames and create a video?

[dgorsman]

You need to use post-processing software, like Blender (the UI is wierd to say the least, but its quite good).  Unlike dedicated visulaization software, Navisworks can't render specific frames so if it doesn't come out right you have to re-render the entire sequence.  For this reason, I usually break down movies into logical edits of 30 seconds or less (look at advertisements and promotional videos; you'll be hard-pressed to find anything longer than ~ 10 seconds).  I then use Blender to compile the frames together into a movie file, and once all the movie files are created I edit those together with wipes, fades, and other transitions (and audio!) for the final product

Navisworks struggled producing a low-res (800 x 600) direct to AVI 30-second movie.  Rendering to frames and post-processing I can do 5-plus minute movies in 720p without effort (and 1080p with a little more time), using H264 or other advanced CODECs.

Depending on what products you have (suites especially) you might have 3DSMAX, which will include similar tools.

[dgorsman]

Infraworks seems to be much better geared towards civil work.  Like you, I've been meaning to investigate but for higher priorities...

One of the default options for DWG files will merge faces adjacent faces that have the same properties into a "collection" that is dealt with as a single object.  Under most cases this is a good thing, but if you want to split out parts of a surface that is on the same layer, same color, etc. you may want to turn this option off so you can deal with the individual faces directly (or in groups using a selection set).  Since our surfaces don't change much after being created, I try to publish a separate NWD of the surface with the face NOT merged for use in presentations.