If you want to show your next roadway design, or other civil engineering project, on the Web and let everyone interact with it in 3D, RDV Systems may be your new best friend.
While not quite up to par with what you have seen in the movie theater, RDV does an admirable job of taking raw CAD models and letting you fly around a scene, complete with moving cars, leaves on the trees, people walking—close to the future you have imagined for your design but now shareable with those that need to be brought up to speed on the extent of your genius. In a way that CAD, or ordinary fly-throughs cannot, RDV enables your audience — whether this is the urban planner, your boss, the head of the Department of Transportation (DoT), any of a number of less-gifted individuals, can now move around your project, imagine themselves in it or over it, love it and ultimately sign off on it.
What It Does
RDV, short for Rapid Design Visualization, can take not only CAD files, but also scenes from Google Earth, 3D scan data, foliage and people from model libraries to complete the virtual 3D scene. Revit and MicroStation input is common, but many other data formats can also be read in, including SketchUp, Civil 3D and AutoCAD.
Who’s Using It?
RDV Systems is already in use by several state…