Civil 3D Reminders: Delving Deeper: Mastering the Autodesk® Civil Visualization Extension

Deeper Concepts

Object Library Categories, stored in Resource Kits. The files are stored in there in the appropriate file. The ini is the parameter for the max file to get object settings.
Resource Kit Manager to add items to a kit or modify them.
Materials assigned in the file or allow Dynamite to assign materials with material IDs.
Move the pivot point to the ground level, center of the vehicle.
In the XZ plane the vehicle needs to be facing you.
Make sure the transformation is reset to make the current one is normal, Dynamite will ignore any translations, rotations or scaling.
Negative values make the vehicle go backwards to the direction of the shape to track.
Exporter configuration file can be changed.

Textures are assigned by u and v direction, u is normal to the object and v is tangential. (U-Tile, V-Tile)
U-Tile value of -1 indicates how many times it’s repeated across the link.
Using subassembly Type it will apply across multiple links.
ID is the material type.
Negative ID will flip the materials.

Think of visualization as a photographer (Set the settings for exposure)
May need to change the exposure control (EV) from the one Dynamite VSP uses.
Final gather lets you get indirect illumination.
Anti-aliasing will give better precision for viewing objects, say in Min 1 to Max 16
Soft Shadow Precision, blur affect on shadows. Higher values for long shadows, esp. for lots of shadows.
Glossy Reflection Precision probably isn’t needed for a infrastructure scene, probably use a smaller precision to get quicker rendering (Not all the way down).
Glossy Refraction Precision, lower it down to get down.
Look at slides to get the differences in render times. Shows the difference in quality and render time comparison.
Use difference values for still images and animation.
For animation render the final gather first and then the objects, not quite clear on this, need to look at the paper for the class.
Daylight system can add clouds, steps in handout.

Sight Checker, can see how far an object can be seen. More of a test to visually prove the design works. Not really a design tool.