Seeing Is Believing

In product development, visualizations help designers iterate early ideas more easily and efficiently, especially when using tools that provide almost instant visual feedback about a change. Rather than simply presenting ideas when they're finished, the technology is an active contributor to developing ideas - a de facto design tool. "It's part of every stage of the design process," said Chris Ruffo, senior industry marketing manager for design visualization in Autodesk's Media and Entertainment Division. "Being able to see what a design looks like throughout the process is critical to our community." "Virtually every Autodesk application has a way to create basic images to [help you] visualize what you're doing and make better decisions throughout the design process," said Autodesk's Ruffo. "It's part of the design process today; it's a given." The same is true of virtually every CAD program on the market. Many integrated rendering tools run on the very same engines that power their stand-alone software cousins. 3ds Max Design offers something not commonly available in the market: visualization capabilities for civil engineers. For this group of users, creating sophisticated renderings was challenging until Dynamite VSP came on the scene to provide an easy workflow between civil CAD applications and 3ds Max Design. Acquired by Autodesk in early 2010 and renamed Civil Visualization Extension, the Dynamite VSP toolset includes an exporter for AutoCAD Civil 3D, Bentley Systems civil CAD solutions, and others, as well as a plug-in for 3ds Max Design. Currently it's available to 3ds Max Design subscription customers only. Users can dynamically link and use civil data sets in 3ds Max Design, creating a quick way to generate renderings and animations for users with little or no 3ds Max Design experience. Watch hardware and software trends to help determine which major advances might be coming to your CAD solution or the visualization product you're using or considering. "Read the tea leaves," said NVIDIA's [Phil Miller]. For example, if your software is based on the Lightworks rendering engine and you see another Lightworks-enabled application adding new rendering functionality, it's a safe bet to assume yours could do the same. It's also a safe bet to assume that features you see in animation and gaming software will make their way into high-end visualization applications, and that high-end visualization features eventually will make their way into mainstream u