A strategy to handle city-scale projects
Up to now, Twinmotion has generally been used to create smaller projects than this. A large project might include visualizing a football stadium or part of a housing estate. As Aerometrex has shown, the tool has the capability to visualize environments on a far grander scale.
That said, an endeavor as ambitious as visualizing an entire city does come with its own set of challenges. “Clear data management and asset production strategy, as well as a good understanding of the limit of the workstation, are essential when dealing with very large datasets,” explains Marre. “A large 3D model cannot be loaded at once. Splitting, merging, and decimating the data into manageable assets is the key.”
A huge city environment results in a hefty 3D model. Having strategies in place to ease the load on your workstation is essential. “Twinmotion does not currently support dynamic loading of level of detail, so in the case of Adelaide, we used high-resolution 3D model tiles over the CBD and merged them together,” says Marre. “We then merged a ring of low-resolution tiles around the CBD and used lower level of detail tiles the further away we are from the CBD.”