Scan to BIM for Roads—from As-Build Capture to Visualization

SHUAIB YUNOS: Hi, everyone and welcome to the Scan to BIM session for Roads here at AU. I hope you're going to enjoy the content that we have today, and let's have a look at what we're getting into for this session. I will be you speaking for today. I am Shuaib Yunos. I am a Civil Design Engineering Technologist, Autodesk Certified Instructor, International Speaker and Webinar Host, also known as the Champion of BIM for Civil Infrastructure here in Africa.

I am currently pursuing my Master's Degree in Civil Engineering, my MEng, and affiliated with the Engineering Council of South Africa, as well as the South African Institute of Civil Engineers. I work at an awesome company, Baker Baynes, based here in Johannesburg, South Africa, being a part of numerous projects involving BIM for Civil Infrastructure, GIS, CDEs or common data environments, Reality Capture, Scan-to-BIM, as well as VR and Visualization. So let's take a look at our agenda for today.

So we can always start off with Scan to BIM for Roads, what is it and what does the workflow entail? Thereafter, we're going to dive in directly into the Scan to BIM Workflow for Roads, and we're going to be walking you through those phases from scan to process to model, getting you started with visualization in 3DS Max and then, of course, handing over your model. Last but not least, we will conclude with today's takeaways and the Q&A to follow. So Scan to BIM for roads, what is it?

So, Scan to BIM involves the integration application of 3D scanning technology within applications and workflows. Scanning all reality capture for roads are usually done using mobile mapping units, UAVs or drones, and/or fixed 3D laser scanners. So the picture that you're seeing on your right hand side is actually a fixed 3D laser scanner on a tripod. This results in digital capture, so it could be a point cloud or photogrammetry off the road terrain needed for design and modeling. Once this is captured, data is processed and verified.

It then can be incorporated with BIM technologies for modeling, design, analysis, and visualization. So what is the workflow? So, of course, you would need to capture the data of the road or the as-build nature or the terrain using scan technology. Thereafter, you would need to process model and visualize, so you would need to process the point cloud or photogrammetry data, extract the surface from that, model it, and then of course, get your construction drawings out and going.

Once the road has been completed in terms of construction, you would need to generate the as-build model of the road. This is where you would repeat steps one and two prior to this stage and you would then generate an as-build construction model of the road. And last but not least, you will then need to hand over the model to your client or organization. So, let's jump into the meat of the presentation, looking at the Scan to BIM workflow. So today's scenario is this.

We are required to do a proof of concept or a PoC as is commonly done to test the application of reality capture and then technologies for road design and modeling in the Netherlands Rotterdam area. If you are familiar with the area, you can always hit me up in the Q&A. We would see who would get it right. Our task will involve, of course, scanning the existing road, creating a good 3D BIM model of the road, as well as producing a visualization model. We will achieve these tasks by using the Scan to BIM Workflow for Roads from as-build capture to visualization, and we will see how we end up.

So this is a bird's eye view of the actual workflow we're going to be applying today, so let's get things on the road. So let's start off with scan. So at this scanning phase, we would use a hardware of our choice for laser capture or reality capture, and this will give you an idea of what we are going to be scanning. So we've got a long strip of road that's going to be what good looks like, and we've got a short strip, which I thought would be very valuable to include, because you can actually see the power visualization confirming your detailed design.

So if it looks off in the visualization, it's probably because your detailed design there is something off there. Now, in this scenario, we used a mobile mapping unit, so it was a Topcon IPS 3, and how it works is you simply mount it onto a vehicle and you drive. Pretty cool, and it gets the job done really, really fast. So once the scanning has been completed, we would need to process that raw data. That brings us to the process phase of the actual workflow. Now, how does this work?

Now, when you open up ReCap Pro, you will have an option to click on new projects. And once you do that, you are presented with two options. One being to import a point log. If you did photogrammetry, you would use photo to read it. In this case, we used import point log. Thereafter, you are prompted to give your project a name as well as specify the sale location, and then we can hit proceed. And then, we can drag and drop or attach our files accordingly to be imported.

Upon import, you are presented with these options where you could adjust the filter settings from minimal to aggressive. I have kept it on minimal for this case. And then, of course, the clip range, being the range that's associated with the scanning device that you would use, and intensity, by rule of thumb, we normally keep it to 100%. You also are presented with the advanced option where you could actually set the decimation grid, which I have set to zero. And then, of course, setting the current as well as target coordinate systems.

You can see we used the Netherlands RT and new system here. We also kept the z-axis as up, as usual. And we are using metric here, so I'm going to be using meters. And then, we can click on import files. Now once this is done, you should see those fields loading up in your desktop application, and that will be busy importing the data. Now, what you would see normally on the bottom right hand corner-- yeah, bottom right hand corner of your screen is that button there.

Now, if you highlight over it, you should see that you'll get these options where you could skip registration or you could do manual registration. I strongly don't recommend skipping registration, unless you are 100% sure. However, you could either also register it or use manual registration, which consists of identifying three common points between two scans and merging it together. Once you're done with the registration, you would then be prompted to index the scans. And then last but not least, launch your project, which is ready to go into your Autodesk application.

So let's have a look at where the finished product was. So, as you can see, this is the process or the result of the point cloud, pretty dense and pretty good. That is the long strip of road that we're going to be using for this presentation. And we could actually just fly through this data just to give you a quick overview of the length of the road. It's a pretty decent stretch of road, I would say. We're going to be designing that, as well as the short strip on the right hand side of the screen.

So the quality of data for your scan sets the tone for the rest of your procedures. What you can do is, you could also crop or fence this off. So that you are only dealing with the area in mention. So what I'm doing here is, I'm basically cropping the extent of the point guard to what I want to concentrate on. And once we do that, we are presented with an option. I will clip the outside, and you can see, it looks pretty neat and tidy. This helps us reduce the file size and processing power required for further application's interphase, and it just keeps things much more cleaner.

Now once we have cropped our point of interest, we can then clip the point cloud for using InfraWorks. So as you can see here, this is where we have stopped. I could actually crop the heights. Now, I do this as a personal habit where I would crop it just to get the ground in mention, because I don't really need the buildings or the trees. However, if you wanted to keep it, you're more than welcome to. But as you can see, I am editing the limit box and I have cropped that to a certain extent or clipped.

It looks pretty decent for now, for the data. I could actually drop it a bit lower so that I would just be left with the road surface, so I can go back here. Of course, you also have the option at the bottom to reset the extent box. So if you do make a mistake, you can always reset it and go back to its original state. And as you can see, I think this looks pretty good for now, and we can use this for our future applications. So once we have sorted out our point cloud, we would then need to model off that data.

And that brings us to the modeling phase, where we're going to be using InfraWorks as well as Civil 3D. So the first step will be to import the point cloud into InfraWorks. As you can see here, I have imported it already. I have created a proposal. It is always good practice or pro tip not to override the master. And as you can see here, that is the point cloud. It doesn't look that visual or that nice, if I could put it that way. And you can see that it is in the asset data card. Once you do import it, you are always prompted to set the coordinate system.

And if it is duly located correctly, it will sit flush exactly where it needs to be. So as you can see, this is the point cloud that we have. Now, it might look a bit dark, a bit gloomy, but what we can do is we can assign a theme to it. Now, the theme can be done in a variety of ways or variety of styles. So, for example, you've got all of those, and we will toggle through them so you could see the difference. So you can see, for the elevation theme, it's more of a reddish color based on the terrain profile or the elevation profile.

I can always go and edit it and change it to something else. So for example, classification is normally used when you are done or post terrain processing. However, we can also change it to elevation in intensity, which is also popularly used in the industry. So whichever one suits your fancy, you're more than welcome to go and use it, and it will help you for better visualization of the actual point cloud. OK, so I can keep doing this.

Intensity is just a black and white type of thing. You can customize the actual colors. Again, it comes to your own preference. The next thing is to extract the terrain from the point cloud in InfraWorks. Now, this is what we want or what we are after using automated laser scanning technology. So here we are in InfraWorks. We can always go to the point cloud terrain option under Manage tab, and you can see it has selected the point cloud by default. If you had multiple point clouds, kindly ensure that you have the correct one ticked.

And then we can also adjust the actual settings or processing rules for this. You've got optimum, aggressive, custom, and so on. By default or by general experience, I normally use it leave it to optimum. It works pretty good. And I always switch off the override model point cloud. Again, it is preference, but what it does is it exports or saves the process point cloud into a separate proposal in InfraWorks, which is pretty good. I'm going to leave it as lightweight.

I'm not going to export it at this point, because we are going to do something else to follow before we do that. And once we get started processing, it will then export that accordingly. So this brings us to the interesting parts or the part that uses real like, which is extracting the features automatically from the point cloud. Now I have zoomed into part of the road here, and this is actually the edge of travel way or edge of pavement, whichever terminology you use, and we are going to go to the linear extraction functionality.

Now here, I can go and select a style. So as you can see here, we've got the bottom of curb, we've got edge of pavement. In this case, I am going to be using that. And all I'm going to do is I'm going to be dropping two points along the line that I would like to extract, and it will extract it accordingly. And this is the result, you will see a long line piecing together that information. But how do you know if it's not to the correct point? We could always right click and go to show cross section view.

Now what this does, let me put it here, it gives you the location of the point versus that. Now you can see, at this point, it's not too pretty low below that surface. But as I move along, it also shows me in the background where I am in my model, so I can drag and drop that dot or elevation point. And as I Zoom in further, you could see how clearly defined the edge of road is. So I can move it there and that will extract the correct elevation for me. I can toggle to the next one or the next chain inch and I can do the exact same thing.

So, I've intentionally done this quite quick so that it does snap to the wrong portions, so that I could actually show you that, if you are faced with this problem, you can actually update it yourself. It does take a bit of time, to be quite honest, depending on the length of your road, but it makes your life much more easier for the phases that come in after this, especially in Civil B [INAUDIBLE] Now, what happens if you need to extract something manually? Great thing is InfraWorks has that capability. So, let's say, I want to extract this widening.

It didn't pick up via linear, so we can actually do it using the same function, but we can toggle off automatic. Again, we can go and select a style, if you like. I'm just going to keep the one that we have. I can then rotate or orbit to the correct position. And simply as clicking on the points that I want, I can click one, two and it will extract that portion for me. I can then continue. I don't have to exit that command. A lot of people make that mistake where they think it's two points at a time.

I will click on that edge, and then just get the final edge. As you can see, it's a continuity. You don't have to click one and two, stop one and two, and so on. You can do it as if you're drawing the poverty line. I can then go and check the cross section and adjust it if needed, and I have the feature extracted for me. You could also use this to extract line marking things and so on, on the road. So, pretty handy, pretty versatile. So once we have exported our points or we've got our extracted features, we now need to export them, so that we could use them in Civil 3D.

So, how is that done? Pretty easy, we can just go to export point cloud and then all of the accompanying data comes in there. You can see linear features, shape. Vertical also is shape. And if you did any transfer vertices you can export that too, CSV, all right? This can't take a bit of time, depending on the extent or the size of your model, but it's pretty cool. So just to recap, we went to the point cloud option in InfraWorks. We selected the linear feature. We then were prompted to select a style or whether we wanted it to be automatic.

We can then go select a style from the ones available. It's, OK. You can also create your custom styles, if you'd like. We then selected our two points of the line and it extracted it along that path. Once that is done, we can then go in and select it and say, show in cross-section view. We can also modify the vertices if they snapped into the wrong position. And then we are presented with the cross-section view, where we can move the point to the correct location if it targets wrong.

Thereafter, we export the out under the pointers option, and we are good to go. We can hit start export. Now, that data can be imported or will be imported into Civil 3D. If you want to import the Shape Format, you can just type in map import into your Civil 3D command line, and it will come in, because it is geo-located like such, so it'll shoot, sit in the correct position. And of course, the point cloud, you can just go to insert and attach. If you did have CSV points, you can also insert them via the points from file option in Civil 3D.

So let's preview the point cloud and extract it in Civil 3D. Now, remember, this stretch of road is what good looks like, right? We're going to make the debut for the troublemaker pretty soon, but this is how good it looks. Now, PC surfers, I just renamed it so we can understand what I'm talking about. It's the point cloud surface that was imported. You can see also the Infrawork surfaces also do come in if you link it via SQ Light, but let's go to the object viewer and have a look at how this surface looks. You can see it's pretty good.

I mean, the quality of your scan really affects everything in this workflow, so please spend some extra time doing the scan properly. Get a really nice good ends point cloud, and it makes your life much more easier right up to this point and going further. So you can toggle between different visualization methods, if you like. I just left it as it is. And of course, if you wanted to insert your point cloud, this is where you would find it. Simply attach it, all right?

And if you, by zooming, you can see my linear features are already imported using the map import function. I've also extracted some line marking and stuff like that, so that you could actually use it and see your visualization that much better. So pretty powerful. You can see that is the important shape file. I've renamed it so we can understand what I am doing, and we have all of that data. Now, if I had to select similar basic AutoCAD command, you can actually see all of the features highlighted that I have extracted. I can continue this.

I can also modify this if the vertices look a bit too sharp or too kink orientated, and we can take it from there. So, what I had done is once I had modified the linear extractions, I color coded it, so we could see exactly what is what. You can see the yellow is the edge of travelway or edge of lane. I've got the cyan color being the-- was it the sidewalk? Yes, the sidewalk. And I didn't have to do that because I was concentrating on the road, but I just wanted to show you that if you wanted to apply a finished material at either side of the road, you definitely can. It's purely up to you and your application.

Now let's look at the resulting corridor. Now, those linear features can be used to target your corridor in Civil 3D so you can use it for your widening and your elevation data, and that's exactly what we did. So this was the resultant corridor. As you can see, it has been created pretty nicely. I used that cross section or assembly for my road and I used the shape data to help me achieve the correct profile of the road. So, pretty easy, pretty nice. It simplifies road design for us and it makes it that much more easier.

So now, we're bringing in the other shorter strip of road, which you're going to be using quite a bit now to show you that things can look good here, but not that great in the visualization aspect. I thought it's quite nice to show that things do go wrong from time to time. And let's have a look at this small strip on the other side. Right, so this was the assembly that I created. You can see this is a much more wider profile of road, and we're going to be using this for the basics for visualization, because I think it's quite a nice profile to do compared to a normal two, three, or four lane type of road.

And if we go to the object filed, as you can see here, this is the finished or top surface. It doesn't look that bad, to be quite honest. Let's toggle through, especially the wire frame looks pretty decent. You can see all of the profiles clearly defined, but we will see what the visualization model has to say about this. So , this is the two corridors that we had created. Now, this has been covered quite extensively on AU as well as on YouTube and other platforms, but I'm just going to show you how to export this just in case you forgot.

So, for example, the line markings or the paintwork, I got them in my model, of course, I extracted them, and I will just select them. It's good practice to put them into associated layers, so your AutoCAD background has come in, and I will use the map export option here. Now, I can give it a name, so I am going to be calling this road marking polygons, because we've got those striping as well as the turn arrows and stuff. And then, we can actually just define what it is, so it's going to be a polygon.

All right, select manually, and then of course, you can see this already pre-selected, which is quite nice. I can just use P for previous or I can just hit Enter because those entities are still selected. And all I got to do is hit OK and it is exported. And then, of course, you can import that into InfraWorks. So I just thought I'll just touch on that, so that you guys can actually use it to your advantage. Now, a key component here before going to InfraWorks is mapping the corridor materials. Now, this can be done in Civil 3D. Now let me show you.

If you go to the Settings tab and we go to code set styles, you will see the styles that are being used. Now, in my case, I'm using the corridor style here for the [INAUDIBLE] template that we've got. I use quite a good chance of Africa, and you've got different parameters that you would need or you can modify. The one we are interested in is the link parameter. Let's stretch this out a little bit, and maybe let's just maximize that column, perfect. This has all of the associated materials to it.

So for example, a code a link of pave has an asphalt finish. Now, you need to preconfigure or assign your materials correctly, and once you do that, you hit Apply. You're going to see why now. Because when you bring that into InfraWorks, it will map it for you automatically. But if you're not too comfortable with this, don't worry. I got your back. That will take us to the visualized aspect. So now, we are on the homestretch of the actual workflow, which is the visualization part with InfraWorks and 3DS Max. So let's look at InfraWorks.

So first thing you would need to do is import Civil 3D into InfraWorks. So I have done that already. It is quite easy. This is what good looks like. That's the long model. All I did was I went to the data sources and I said, I attach you all to this Civil 3D drawing, simple as that, and all of the associated data comes through from your Civil 3D drawing. OK, so that is pretty much it. I can close that. You can see all of the associated Civil 3D metadata does come through.

I can also toggle off the line marking if I need to, more on that later on in the presentation. So this is how it looks, right? What I do recommend, another pro tip that I would give you is, if you have performance issues on your computer or your model is quite big, turn off some of the layers. Like for example, I've got the point cloud layer switched off. So I can also crop the extent of that model, because I don't need that entire thing right now, and it will improve your performance. So, just a tip there. So let's review the curriculum materials.

Now, there are two methods that you have. The first one is recommended, but you would also need the second one on the right hand side. So let's start off with component mapping, where you can do multiple components in one interface. So you would need to select your components, so maybe your road, your curb, or your sidewalk, something like that, and you will then click on component mapping in the asset card. Now, what does this look like? Pretty much this.

So once you select the component, you will see the hidden component mapping, and then you will see the link to component mapping. It's a lot of mapping in one interface. And then this will present this menu to you. Now, this is where you could assign a material to a link code or a shape code in Civil 3D. So if you didn't do it in several 3D, you can come and manually do it here. The great thing is, you could do multiple links or multiple materials at once. Hit run rules at the bottom. It will update your visualization model in InfraWorks and then hit OK.

The second option is, it works pretty much the same way you would be presented with the same asset card, component mapping, but you would click on the material itself. Now, the only thing with this is you have to do one component or one element at a time. So it will give you a preview of the recently used materials that you have or you could click on more styles and it will present this menu. Now, this menu is where you could go and select the type of category as well as whichever material you would like.

And as you can see here in the bottom, please make sure that you select the component first. Also, you wouldn't get these menus. And then you hit OK, and it will update. Now let's have a look at it in action. So as you can see, I've got my component selected. And if I go to component mapping, that is the menu that I would get in the center of your screen right now, and I can go and customize the category or the material I want InfraWorks to be linking to the Civil 3D code. So I could do that pretty much quite fast here.

You can see there's an array of materials on here. You can create your own custom materials if you'd like, but I like keeping things simple and out of the box. And we can go and select whatever we'd like from here. All right, so maybe I want to use that light granite tile for that type of-- if you have like a paved road or something like that, you could always use that over asphalt, and you will visualize it according to the real environment. I mean, you can go on Google Maps, Google Earth, check it out and then map it through that.

And of course, you can adjust the priority of the actual materials, so that they display correctly. We could run rules, we hit, OK, and we're good to go. The second option, we're going to do the second or the short road, short strip of road. I will show you how you could actually customize it. As you can see, I've imported that again from Civil 3D. All of this data are in there and, of course, I went there, so just to tell you how I brought it in. And once I select the road, you can see the asset card does populate.

Again, it is from Civil 3D, and I can go and toggle off the line marking. So, for example, if I switch that off, you can see all of the line marking is off. Why did all go off? It's simple, because it's linked to one alignment. If you wanted separate alignments so that you can control it separately, then you would adjust or create your assembly accordingly. So it's nice to keep in mind how things will work in InfraWorks. So let's have a look here. Now, this should be a bike lane. It shouldn't have a blacktop finish.

So what we're going to do is we're are going to select that road. Now once we do that, I will go and use instead of the component mapping, I will use the material override. Of course, again, you can see the menus are exactly the same if I wanted to use this method. But since I've already shown it to you, I'm not going to do that, so we'll hit cancel, and we will go do it manually. Now, if I go to more styles, let's go and have a look at what InfraWorks has for bike paths. So we would go to the category on the top.

We've got a bike path on the top, and this is the associated material textures that we could use. That's not exactly what I'm looking for, but if you have paints on them, which I've seen in quite a few countries, we can go and select a color. Now this might not be the correct color, but I'm just going to go with it anyway. All right, and here we are. It has updated that bike path for us. Of course, we would need to do the other side. That's why I say that it is manual. It will work in one component at a time.

If that was not the case, this one would have updated as well. So what we would need to do is repeat those steps. I will select this material, because I've used it recently, and here we are. So, those are the two options that you have to override or to check your corridor materials in InfraWorks. Now, like I said, the shape, importing shape files into InfraWorks has been extensively covered, but a lot of people aren't familiar with using the built-in tools in InfraWorks. Now, let's have a look at that. So here, we are we've got my road selected.

And if I go to pavement markings, there is a modified lane markings. A lot of users say that they didn't even know this was here, to be quite honest. But as you can see, as I toggle through the various line markings, it actually highlights in the model, so I can see exactly what I am using. I can also switch it off. So maybe I didn't want to see that line or maybe that lane is actually quite wider. Maybe you did your assembly incorrectly, but if you could tweak it here, you don't have to go and reimport that. But you can see here that the line has disappeared.

So I can go and customize this as much as I like. What about the line styles? There are multiple. As you can see, we've got a continuity lane. We've got the lane line up as well at the turn line and other options. You can also customize the colors, so I know sometimes we have a yellow line that's running down the center. You could also change the color in this menu. So I thought this will be much more useful thing to show, and a lot of people can make use of it.

Now, let's have a preview of the InfraWorks completed model. So, I've used the short strip of road here, because it was the quickest one to show, and you can already see that there is some things wrong here because the lines are a bit too squiggly and the line marking doesn't look that correct. You will get used to it, and this is where visualization plays such a critical role to getting your model up to speed. So I thought, let's use something that went wrong. This is the model snapshot or at the point cloud. You can see it looks pretty good.

I mean, it looks quite nice, visually appealing. Again, you can see the lines. I've left some. Like, for example, the median, I've done it proper. I've edited that, but I've left like the bike path and the sidewalk so you could actually compare what good looks like and what bad looks like. How would you edit it? You would need to just fine tune it in Civil 3D, refresh your data sources here, and, boom, that will be updated, no problem. And this was the InfraWorks model versus the actual real thing from Google Earth. you can see it looks pretty good.

I mean, besides the leaves on the tree and the sky being blue, I think it looks pretty good in InfraWorks. If you spend a bit more time on selecting the correct materials to match this, you would get a really, really good visualization model. And generally, as a Civil professional, this is where we stop, because this, InfraWorks gives you an easy way to visualize your projects, and it is very visually rich. But what if you want to take it a bit further? Now, I've incorporated 3DS Max here to get you started.

There are many AU sessions by my fellow speakers that have dived into this in detail, but just as a Civil professional, to get you started, I thought I will show you a few steps to a basic visualization. So the first step is to export the InfraWorks model to FBX for use in 3DS Max. And what does this mean? So this is our model. Again, we can use that short strip there, and all I got to do is go to explore 3D model. Now, I can crop my model. I can use the entire model.

In this case, I am going to draw a polygon, because I don't really need such a big model, especially for visualization. And we can create a render frame, that is not important to me. So I can crop it, I can go set the saved destination. So I will drop it in my AU2021 folder. All right, we'll just give it a name, so let's go AU2021. Keep it simple. I can save it, and there it is. You can tick on these options. The large FBX file support, you don't have to have it on, unless you have a model like two gigs or over like general rule of thumb.

But if you just want to make sure, you're more than welcome to. Take it, it's not really necessary, and you will then export the FBX. Now, once the export is finished, we will then need to import that into 3DS Max. So let's have a look. So I've got 3DS Max open. I will get Civil View running. If you haven't-- not familiar with Civil View, it was pretty good with Civil 3D, but I thought I'll just mention that here. And what we're going to do is we're going to import that FBX file that we've just exported.

So here we are, we've got the export and we hit Open. The current preset, what I'm going to do is I'm going to set it to Autodesk media and entertainment. I mean, that is by default. I've used that quite a bit. And we hit, OK. It might take a few seconds, depending on the extent of size of the model, and this is the result. And this is our model brought in different views. I could then maximize this viewport so that I get a nice 3D view, and this is the result. It comes in pretty good with all of the textures from InfraWorks.

So you see, if you do your InfraWorks model correctly, as well as you assign the correct textures, if you want to go like 4K render or really, really good quality in 3DS Max, which we know it definitely does, it makes your life that much more easier. So how would you do a basic visualization using Arnold? Again, I'm using basics, because this is as an intro for you, to get you started with rendering in 3DS Max, and we're going to be using the Arnold Renderer.

What you would probably see here is bad compared to what you can achieve when you spend a bit of time with 3DS Max, but let's have a look. So what I would do is, I would go to the rendering option and I would look at my render setup. Now here, make sure that your render is said to Arnold. You can use the other ones, but Arnold is pretty good, and I'm happy with that. And what we would then need to do is to convert the scene. OK, so if we go back to the rendering option, there's a scene converter.

So once we select that, you will see that the current preset is Arnold, and the description is converted to Arnold compatible features. So this will kind of set up your scene so that the random materials are Arnold compatible. And once you hit convert scene, it will start the progress. And at the end, it will show you complete, and you can then close this window. Again, this can take a little bit of time, a few minutes or so, depending on the size of your model. But once that is done, the next thing we would need to do is render.

So I will click on a render frame window, so meaning, what I'm seeing on my screen, it's going to be rendering that part. We have many render presets that you can use. However, you could switch them off or you could just leave them as is. You can also have a floating viewport or a quad, which you are looking at right now. And again, you can play around with these as much as you'd like to see what the difference is, and of course, I'm going to leave it as RGB offer. And then all I got to do is click Render for Production.

If you're going VR route, you would go interactive, so I will just hit Render, and then it will start the process of analyzing what's in that window. Right, so if you do hit Render and you don't see anything happening, just relax for a few seconds. As you can see, it pops up. All right, I've had a lot of users contact me for that. It does take a few seconds sometimes, and it will start progressing. It will look like a bit pixelated, and then it will get much more sharp in quality. Give it some time and you will get your result.

Now you can see already, it looks pretty good, especially if you look at the quality of the trees, but it is quite dark. I mean, it looks like my time in the Netherlands. We can fix that by adding what we call as a sun position. So how do we do it? Now, we can either do it on the right hand side by clicking the light bulb, but I want to show you a Civil View. And we're going to go to the Civil View Explorer, because for Civil professionals, this is a really handy tool. It's more handy when you're importing it from Civil 3D into 3DS Max, but we can also apply it to an InfraWorks model.

So if you go to the environment and lighting tab, you can see we can create what we call a sun positioner. Now, on the right ribbon, as I scroll on, I can set the time. So if you're a photographer, you don't like the correct, the best time to take a photo or the golden hour, as it has been mentioned by Frank in his previous AU sessions, you can actually go and then select the position on the Earth. Now, this is currently North America. We are working in Europe, so we go to Europe, and we would then need to find Rotterdam.

So we will scroll down here a little bit, and here it is, Rotterdam, Netherlands. You can see the marker on the axis, I would call it that. And now, I would just need to double click on a place. So if I click on there, it's going to use that as a reference, and you will see, there will be a ucs or xyz that will pop up any minute, here we are. And it will allow you to position the sun wherever you would like. So, it takes a bit of time getting used to the navigation, a little bit of getting used to, but I'm going to probably just drop it there.

And when I do, you can see it illuminates the actual site. You can also play with the exposure control and stuff like that, but we don't have time for that in this session, but let's continue with what we have as a default. Like I said, this is just getting you started off with our renderer. Now, once I set the lighting, I will go and hit re-render or render again in the rendering view, and you will see that it is looking a bit better, much more better. I mean, you can even get the shadow of the buildings, the shadow of the trees.

It's looking much more realistic. It's got that feel that's coming into it, and that is the result. So I'm just going to save this. I could save that image by just clicking the Save option. And again, the more you play with 3DS Max, the more you get to tweak these settings, the light. You could also use HDR images to create a nice really beautiful looking skyline. Unfortunately, we don't have time for that, but this will get you started with rendering as a Civil professional.

So, this is a basic snapshot when we've done the rendering on like-- very quickly in 3DS Max. You can see it has potential to become very, very realistic, especially when you position your cameras and stuff like that. And this is the model versus real. You can see, I could have probably tweaked the sky a little bit. Of course, if you did your design correctly, the road will look perfect. But like I said, I wanted to show you that you could use visualization to pick up something wrong in your detailed design.