Visualisation of complicated agent based simulation – such as traffic or pedestrian modelling often takes second place to the actual simulation process. Yet, if modellers are to communicate to a wider field, the obvious link is to import simulations into 3D modelling software, such as 3D Max. Newlands & Company have refined a series of Max Scripts to allow them to view their simulation data in a 3D environment and the results are impressive:

Newlands and Company provide more details on their site..

Movies are the obvious choice when you need to depict the urban environment, yet so often the real world is overlooked in favour of the virtual. Only last week we were asked to create a movie of London for a well known organisation using 3D modelling when a standard video capture would of portrayed the scene infinitely better.

The following movie depicts this point, its a simple travelogue by IDJ Media but ends up providing a good overview of the area – something that in 3D would of been a huge project:

Suffice to say that by recommending a ‘real world’ movie we lost out on any major 3D modelling work and they went out and brought a digital camera…