Virtual Reality - VR Civil 3D

[Marshall1260]

Back in 2003, I conceptualized the marriage of AutoCAD 3D Designing (LDD - Land Development Desktop) with FPS Gaming (Doom and Quake) to create a virtual atmosphere to aid in visualization of Civil Engineering Design. Virtual headset and hand controls, with a 3D rendering of your surveyed site and design 3D grades, as well as 3D utilities, etc.

I submitted the concept to Dave Simeone with Autodesk and it was received with a message that they were heading in that direction and would like to discuss further. I was then suddenly dropped, like a hot rock, with the explanation that the concept was too futuristic. (What?????) This was just prior to the release of Civil 3D (2005) and I think the 3D capabilities were what Dave was excited about. VR was too futuristic.

Virtual Reality, as we know it today, was in its infancy back then, but what about now?

Architects and Structural Engineers have jumped on board, but what about Autodesk?

Huh?

Bueller? ............... Bueller?

Autodesk? ............... Anybody listening?

[dgorsman]

Autodesk Stingray: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/stingray/ct-p/803 plus Unity, Unreal, and other engines.

FYI, a lot of engineers are NOT on board with VR.  That's mostly with senior architects and client executives who are well downstream of the design portion of a project.  Much like making a more traditional fly-through movie there's still a lot of work to do to get the data into something workable in VR (such as reducing face count for acceptable frame rates).

[troma]

I've thought it would be fun and useful to design in VR. Probably need more computing power to do it though.

Also would be cool to have geolocated AR: actually walk down the street and see existing and proposed sewers underground as you go!

[Marshall1260]

dgorsman,

I agree that there is a lot of work to be done to make it happen. I'm just saying that it deserves to be explored now that VR is a real thing. There's a lot to be benefited from with the VR Design aspect. I see the VR push ebb and flow, but it still appears to be moving forward.

troma,

THAT'S what I'm talking about!!!

[evolutionengineeringmn]

The only reason why Autodesk is not there is because the underlying code for C3D is single threaded with single core.  Multi-core multi-threaded code is required in order to compute efficiently.  The likelihood of Autodesk doing that, in my opinion, is zero...yeah for Civil Engineers and the old guard!

[Marshall1260]

Thanks for the insight. I'm hopeful that they will someday bend.
The pressure to VR or Augment is only going get heavier.
Maybe they'll do like they did with Land Desktop.
One day they'll put out a memo stating that Civil 3D is no longer supported.
Here's the new improved "Civil 3D VR"!!!!!
Oh, and by the way, you are now obsolete ...... oh wait ...... did that
sound bitter???

[Anonymous]

This is happening... and I have been hard at work to get a workflow together for this over the last few years.  The 'trick' is that you need to mash Civil3D, Infraworks and 3DS Interactive (formerly Stingray) together.  Check out my class from AU 2017!

http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/classes-on-demand/class-catalog/classes/year-2017/infraworks/ci1214...