From the course: Infraworks: Visualization Techniques

3D graphics options - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: Infraworks: Visualization Techniques

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3D graphics options

- [Instructor] Let's use the bookmarks to navigate to bookmark two wharf. And for those of you who don't know Birmingham in the UK very well, it's a canal city, so they have all these canals that they used to use for moving goods throughout the city. This is one of those canals and a wharf. So, have a look here. We've got a couple of water coverages. We've got a warehouse with some facade. The rest of the buildings have not had facades applied just to make things a little bit quicker. But let's switch up some of the options that we can look at in order to visually enhance things like water and shadows. So, go back to your application options, and this time you're going to choose 3D graphics. And on the 3D graphics panel, you'll notice that at the top here you have two options. Either optimize for speed or optimize for quality. What we want to do is just click out of that and let's zoom to facade reflection, bookmark number three. And this is where you'll see these application options. So go back to application options, 3D graphics. Just move the window to the side over here. From the dropdown, choose optimize for quality, and watch what changes, so hit that. You'll notice that many of these boxes have become checked. You've got anti-aliasing, you've got ambient occlusion. And we'll look at these in a little bit more detail. But the main thing is the difference in how the water reflects and shadows reflect. So, let's switch back to optimize for speed to see the difference, the huge difference in what's going on here. Now, this is a catchall for all the things below. You know, if you hit quality, all of these things are automatically set. So, switch back to optimize for speed and we'll play around with these things on their own. First up, we'll ignore display detail for the moment because that specifies, you know, things that can be done individually and we're only interested in what's going to happen in the entire application. So let's look at anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is smoothness in InfraWorks world. So, notice the lines of the building over here when anti-aliasing is off. Now, let's change it to two times and you can see how things change. Change it to eight and see how things are different. So let's hit okay. And have a look in at the building. We can see how defined the lines are. Let's go back to our application options 3D graphics, and change that back. So, for example, off and eight times. So these lines are way more defined when you have anti-aliasing switched on. Next up we have water reflections which is pretty much what it says in the 10. So, switch on the water reflections and you will see the reflection of the building and trees or, you know, bridges, whatever happens to be near it in the water surface itself. Now, the good thing about the 3D graphics application options is that they're pretty much instantaneous. So, it's not like the model generation where you have to regenerate things in order for it to take effect. So, if you have something you find it's slowing down your model generation and your panning and zooming and moving around, you can just switch these off and then switch them back on pretty quickly. Next up, we have realistic water. Realistic water adds things like ripple effects and splash effects. However, it's worth noting that whilst we can turn this on and off quite easily, there we go, switch on, switch off. There's no control over how the water moves. So, for example, you can't simulate seashores or high waves. And whilst you can control, if you look up at the sky here, you can control the wind speed which controls the clouds and you can control the wind speed which controls wind direction which controls the speed of the clouds. That has no bearing on the water here whatsoever. So it may be that you've got your clouds traveling in one direction, because of the wind and the ripples, the pools will still be going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, we can't change that. Shadows. This little button turns the shadows on or off for all objects. So trees, bridges, buildings, whatever. Let's switch it on and see, let's hit okay and let's zoom out a little bit and see the difference. So, see the shadows over here. Let's go back to our application options 3D graphics and switch the shadows off or on, off. And, like I said, it's worth noting that this is a universal setting. So, for example, if you had realistic vegetation, it would shadow each and every individual leaf. And we can look at this by going to the InfraWorks button, choosing the pencil and it says put a row of trees. So, add a row of trees, any tree will do, just a normal one. And just click once to start the line, double click to end the line and InfraWorks will put realistic vegetation along that particular line. Click close and then hit escape to get out of the tool and close the InfraWorks. Now, let's just zoom in to the trees that we've just put there and have a look at the shadows. Now, look at these shadows. These are incredibly detailed. And this is what makes shadows quite a greedy beast. Just be aware that when you're using realistic vegetation and shadows, that it's going to try and do every single leaf so switch shadows off until you're ready to create your presentation or your snapshots and then switch them back on. Finally, on the panel here, we have the ambient occlusion option. Ambient occlusion only works with shadows and it's render speak for how things are shaded. All right, in real life, your shadows don't just come from the sunshine, so the direct sunlight. So the sun's coming from this direction, it's going through the leaves and it's casting a shadow on the ground. That's not how things work in the real world. In real life, the shadows thrown also come from neighboring objects. So if you've got a tall tree next to a window, you're not just gonna get shadows from the sunlight, you're also going to get a shading effect from the tree. And that's what ambient occlusion does. So let's cancel out of here and zoom to bookmark four, facade shading. Here we see our facade and open our application options back up 3D graphics. And have a look at what happens when we switch ambient occlusion from off to medium. See the difference? And then to high. Even more of a difference. So, you're not just getting shadows from direct sunshine. Over here, you're getting shadows from the overhang of the building, or, you know, a different balustrade, or even, you know, a plant on the windowsill or that type of thing. Finally, we have two other options here. And cancel out of the application's options and let's zoom to somewhere where we can have a look at these. I'm going to zoom to number five, the interior of a building. So I'm going inside this building. And have a look at what it looks like. It's transparent. I can, you know, look around. I don't see anything. And that's what the backface option does for us. So, if we say show backfaces, it's useful if you want to generate views from inside a building. So, switch this on and you'll see that the backface of the building is rendered the same way as the front of the building. This isn't very useful in this type of scenario where you have procedurally generated buildings. But, for example, if you want to navigate inside a house and see outside, this would come in very handy. It also applies to terrain. So, if we switch it off and we go underneath the terrain, see, how it's transparent? We can't see the terrain anymore. It works in the same way. So, backface will show you the interior of a building and the underside of a terrain. Now, you don't need to switch this on because what it's doing is it's going to just use processing power to generate things that you aren't going to see. However, what you can do is use it for when you see outside of a building from rendered materials. So let's close that and head to interior windows. Here we are inside the building and it's a revet model. So, if we zoom out, let's just zoom and... Oh, where've gone? There we are. See, we've got our... Our little house over here. This is a revet model. And you can see that we have rendered materials, we've got glass, we've got brick, we've got plaster, we've got a little weird wind turbine for some reason. I don't know, generating your own power or something like that. But you'll see that the front wall here is mostly glass. Let's zoom into that. And here we can see the view of our building from inside. So, that's something that's also controlled by backface. The final thing on our application options panel that we're going to look at is 10 bit color channels. This control here is for high performance monitors and it allows you to see 68 billion colors which I don't even understand why you would do that. The other thing that I don't like about this if you have 10 bit enabled, you won't be able to create screenshots or story boards which basically renders it useless to me. So, before we move on, let's make sure we have the following settings set. Number one is optimized for speed. Your display detail is just hanging out in the middle 'cause we haven't changed that. Anti-aliasing switched, too. Water reflections are on. Realistic water is on. Shadows are on. Ambient occlusion, let's switch that to high. Show backfaces is off and use 10 bit color channels is off, as well. Hit okay and let's have a look at some more visualization options.

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