Attempting to get our dept into rendering road projects - need software suggestions

[Creig Lambert]

Hello,
I work for a state DOT office and have convinced our office manager to let me try and get us up and running in 3D rendering of proposed road/bridge projects. These would be used in public presentations and for media distribution to show what the proposed projects would look like when completed. I have already warned him that this is something that is likely to take quite a while to learn before I can turn out even semi-realistic looking still renders. I am not going to be working on rendering full-time, but in spare time and lulls between road/bridge designs.
Having said that, we use MicroStation/Geopak primarily and have MicroStation J and Microstation V8 installed on our workstations. AFAIK, MicroStation can save/export a design as an AutoCAD .dwg file. I was also able to discover we had an unopened/unused copy of 3D Studio VIZ Release 3 sitting on a shelf in another office. I had them send it to me and am in the process of getting it upgraded to VIZ 2006 (hopefully with subscription).
So I have a couple pieces of the puzzle already. MicroStation for bridge structures and VIZ 2006 for buildings/roadways/terrain. I am also leaning towards suggesting we purchase e-on's Vue5 Infinite for landscaping as the majority of our projects are in heavily wooded rural and rural/stream locations.
We currently have half a dozen Dell Dimension 360s (2.8GHz P4, 1 gig RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX500) which could be linked to form a render farm if needed. Actually, these machines are going to be replaced with newer ones in the coming year with the old ones going to other office members, so the number of machines available for render farm duty would be near a dozen or so).
And lastly, we have a few survey crews that would be able to provide detailed surveys of the proposed area and landmarks (roadway, ditches, tree lines, power poles, etc) and I'm hoping to be able to import this data into VIZ 2006 to be able to have an accurate groundmap of the current terrain to work from (not sure what format is necessary for importing into VIZ).
I'm hoping I could get a few suggetions from CGarchitect members/VIZ users as to what software I'm still missing in order to create semi-realistic 3D stills and possibly fly-through animations later on down the road. I'm guessing some sort of post production image manipulating software is also needed (Photoshop or equivalent).
Thank you,
Creig

[Lambros Potamianos]

Photoshop is a must. Viz is more than enough for stills and flythroughs. You may consider several tree/scenery solutions, ranging from Vue to RPCs and lowpolygon trees, whatever suits you. Many people use rpcs, some Vue, we use Onyx trees.
Viz can give you more than semi-photorealistic results, especially if you get a copy of Vray. Vray will deliver better and faster, and you can also use proxies for tree meshes.
It all goes down to how much effort and energy you will put in this business. If you attain a certain level of profficiency working with viz and vray, you can do wonderful things. Good luck!

[Travis Schmiesing]

Photoshop is a must. Viz is more than enough for stills and flythroughs. You may consider several tree/scenery solutions, ranging from Vue to RPCs and lowpolygon trees, whatever suits you. Many people use rpcs, some Vue, we use Onyx trees.
Viz can give you more than semi-photorealistic results, especially if you get a copy of Vray. Vray will deliver better and faster, and you can also use proxies for tree meshes.
It all goes down to how much effort and energy you will put in this business. If you attain a certain level of profficiency working with viz and vray, you can do wonderful things. Good luck!

don't forget the good old mapped texture on 2d plane facing camera. you can get any more low poly, and a lot of times this is the best solution for trees that the camera is not close to.

[Creig Lambert]

Thank you for your suggestions. I will strongly recommend we purchase Photoshop as well as the VIZ upgrade. I don't want to ask for too much at one time, so I think I'll put Vue Infinite on the backburner for now. By the time I've gotten a grasp on successfully using VIZ/Photoshop with any degree of skill, sufficient time should have passed that I can safely request the additional software. Especially if I can provide examples of my work as proof.

Again, thank you for your suggestions and I will continue to browse the boards looking for ideas/solutions/suggestions as I await my entrance to the world of 3D rendering.

Regards,

Creig

[Daniel Bourbonnais]

Terrain models with any level of accuracy can be so complex that they will slow a computer down to a crawl. When you add roads, trees (especially), water, bridges, buildings, cars & people you may quickly exceed your system limits. You will need a powerful workstation for development and you may need to keep your components separate while modeling.
Try running some tests to get a sense of your systems ability to display a mapped terrain.
Just a tip.