Brisbane, Australia
For Release June 2001

HIGHROAD VISUALISATION ANNOUNCED

Creative Engineering announced that HighRoad Version 7 will be available in July 2001. Version 7 includes realistic visualisation of road designs, including the creation of drive through movies.

To create a drive through movie, all that the road designer needs to specify is the design speed and a sight distance. The resulting movie provides a realistic simulation of driving along the road - an ideal medium to show non-technical stakeholders.

Developed by a highway design engineer, HighRoad's key objective has always been to put simplicity and useability back into road design software. "3D views can be created without any extra work by the road designer," says Chris Baker, director for Creative Engineering. "All the textures such as pavement, concrete and grass are automatically applied."

In today's world clients and other stakeholders demand impressive visual presentations of engineering designs. Because the visualisation process is part of HighRoad, no additional work is necessary. Gone are the days of hiring specialised graphic designers to create simulations. Now the road designer can create movies with just one click.

Not only does this produce a photo-realistic movie, but it also provides the ability to judge whether sight distance requirements have been met. This is especially useful in cases of complex combinations of vertical and horizontal alignment. Such cases can be very difficult to analyse using old methods.

A realistic perspective view of a proposed project is an ideal way to assess its environmental and visual impact. Because the perspective view is based on precision road design data it is also a reliable way to determine the visibility of the project from key vantage points.

The resulting simulations can be deployed on the Internet for viewing by stakeholders at their own time and pace.

The 3D viewing enhancements are integrated with HighRoad's 'intelligent object' technology.

Therefore as well as having built-in capability to do calculations behind the scenes, the projectÕs objects now also store information about how they should appear in a 3D view. Commonly used objects (ie typical sections) can be stored in a library for reuse, and these become the building blocks of road networks.

Networks of interconnected roads can be synchronised so that changes in any one of the roads are carried through to the other related roads. Even a small change in the width of a road can affect the vertical and horizontal geometry of an attached side road and HighRoad handles this without prompting.

HighRoad's tools are adaptable to a wide variety of civil construction tasks, and because the graphical interface can be learnt quickly, it is proving to be productive for earthmoving contractors. In addition to designing buildings pads and access roads, the tools can be used for ring tanks, drainage channels, and irrigation storages. Designs can easily be transferred to the ground for construction by uploading direct to electronic survey equipment.

According to Chris Baker, "The overriding design consideration at Creative Engineering is that engineers should not have to spend months becoming proficient in the software that they use. By hiding the complexity of calculations behind an elegant graphical interface, HighRoad allows users to focus on the job at hand, rather than getting bogged down by complicated commands or engineering calculations."

The program is versatile enough to be used across the world from designing roads in the world's highest city, La Paz, Bolivia, to highway construction on the plains of Minnesota, USA. Other projects include designing a yacht basin in the Caribbean, seawalls in Ireland, highway design optimisation for design and construct projects in Sydney, cane farm irrigation in North Queensland, temporary coffer dam for mine construction in NSW, cobbled street rehabilitation in Belgium, urban arterial motorways in Colombia, and forestry road construction in the rugged Coast Range of western Canada.

This innovative software is an Australian product. Creative Engineering is a wholly Australian owned company and was established in 1986 to develop advanced road design software. This software is used around the world and has been sold in 38 countries. It is available in languages other than English, such as Japanese (Kanji), Italian and Spanish.

HighRoad will run on Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT 4.0 and Macintosh, and uses industry standard formats for road design and terrain data.

A demonstration kit is available for download.

Contact Chris Baker 07 3356 6271

Press Releases
HighRoad Visualisation announced - June 2001

HighRoad Windows Version Launched - 25 March 2001

Reviews
HighRoad for Windows - Multi-Cad, May 2001

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