by Brett Settles
AEC Solutions Engineer

Using AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010 for visualization is something that not a lot of people think about. Usually we go somewhere else for that, for us that option would be Autodesk 3ds Max. 3ds Max can no doubt create stunning images and amazing drive by scenarios that look wonderful, but what if you want something a little simpler, something that just needs to get a point across to someone who is not familiar with looking at plans, or is preparing a presentation?

AutoCAD Civil and AutoCAD Civil 3D can do all of this pretty well. The ability to apply render materials to anything very easily and the Corridor Code Sets make it a breeze to take something from plan to presentation quickly.


Here we have a roadway model and we need to quickly create a pretty picture of this thing. All we need to do is access the corridor link codes and change a few things. These are held in the corridor options or in the settings tab as well as seen below.


 

Or

Both places are fine to edit from. Now we need to know what we are looking at.

These link codes contain rendering materials as an option for each link. Assigning these codes will change the Display of the corridor when rendered. Notice in the picture below the options available when picking a material.

We then need to go through and carefully pick out which part of the corridor matches which material and when all is said and done choose Apply and OK. Now when we access our corridor properties > codes tab, we should be able to choose the code set we made (which can be saved in a template) and start to render the corridor.

At this point you can just set up your 3D View and use the regular AutoCAD rendering tools to create some pretty impressive imagery.



Keep in mind that there will be different methods for different situations. For example, if you are modeling a whole proposed site, I would suggest creating your rendering from corridor surfaces that are pasted into an Existing Ground surface to create a Finished Ground. Have fun!