Topic: How to: Creating 3d fly through in Civil 3D

[alanjt]

Does anyone have any information on creating a 3d fly through of a roadway in civil 3d? It was asked of me today and I've never done anything like that.

[LE3]

Alan,

This is my second day using C3D 2011 - just did a quick one using the command: NEWSHOT that can be viewed from SHOWMOTION iconbar (_navsmotion)

guess that can be use for that... but wait for the ones that know.

[alanjt]

Cool.
I found the Motion Path Animations under the VIEW pulldown. I'm playing with that now.

[mjfarrell]

Cool.
I found the Motion Path Animations under the VIEW pulldown. I'm playing with that now.

You will find that having the camera attached to one path, and following another will produce the best animations...also I hope you have plenty of time for those scenes to render 

[alanjt]

Cool.
I found the Motion Path Animations under the VIEW pulldown. I'm playing with that now.

You will find that having the camera attached to one path, and following another will produce the best animations...also I hope you have plenty of time for those scenes to render 

That makes a huge difference. I'm not sure if I can do this, but he said to play with it for a bit.

[Willie]

try "drive" command

[mjfarrell]

Cool.
I found the Motion Path Animations under the VIEW pulldown. I'm playing with that now.

You will find that having the camera attached to one path, and following another will produce the best animations...also I hope you have plenty of time for those scenes to render 

That makes a huge difference. I'm not sure if I can do this, but he said to play with it for a bit.

The cool part about having the camera  'look' at another path...is that through some clever segmentation...one can cause the camera to...open with target in distance...then pan/tilt towards object of interest...and hold focus there for several frames and then slowly pan to other areas of interest.....

one can also use the VIEW command to organize other STILL frames that can later be used in video editing app to fade/dissolve cut to shot..and then you insert your special views

[mjfarrell]

A trick to start the camera path...lift the feature line, from the alignment...edit it's elevation to get it up to eye level, and then explode it into a polyline....then attach the camera to that path...be sure to turn on 'corner deceleration' to steady the camera through the polyline vertices

[alanjt]

Ok, I've got the fly through looking good. Is is possible to overlay an image or something to match the surface? I'm trying with the Map options, but it's saying I have to have polygons. Thoughts?

[Jeff_M]

DrapeImage perhaps?

The help that describes the process can be found under this Heading: Draping Images On Surfaces

[mjfarrell]

TipTo perform this operation, ensure that the surface display style has triangles visibility enabled. See Editing a Surface Style. Also, ensure that Realistic is a default type of materials set in the Material Editor in the Materials window

[alanjt]

Awesome, thanks guys.

[butzers09silverado]

I've done this quite a few times if you need help... i see this is an old post but I'm an old Skool FormZ, studioViz, and now C3D.

looks like you got what you needed but let me know.

[RONJON322]

I figured out how to do a fly by in autocad but I can't get my background to come out when I record.  All I get is a black background.  Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Please help!!
Ronnie

[mjfarrell]

map an image to a plane and place that within the camera view, and view style must be set to realistic
  or one could use
Navisworks
OR
Infrastructure Modeller (Infraworks)