Over the past week, I have spent many long hours creating 3D movie clips for a public participation forum. We have 9 clips prepared for the public workshop, and I generally had to create 30-40 tours before getting a good one to make into a video clip. Below is a list of comments and suggestions based on my experiences. Some are probably minor tweaks to the software, while others are probably major changes. In general, my comments fall into two categories, graphics or usability.

1) Flashing pavement markings. We have one roadway bridge passing over another roadway. On the elevated roadway, all the pavement markings start flashing whenever we change the view (rotate, change the viewing angle, or just scroll up/down/left/right), and can be quite distracting. This doesn't seem to happen on the roadway segments at elevation zero.

2) There seems to be a major problem with the rendering of channelized right turns when there are elevation changes. For the elevated roadway bridge I was working with, it was a typical "diamond interchange" over a highway, with traffic signals at each end of the bridge. I set the elevation to 25 at each signal, so that the bridge was flat (and elevated at 25'). At each intersection, the other 3 legs had adjacent nodes at elevation zero. Every right turn at the intersection was a channelized right (with a radius in the 100-150' range). The only work-around that I could do to get it to look somewhat reasonable was to create a bend node on each leg that had a channelized right turn. I then set the elevation of each bend node to 25' (the same as the intersection node), thereby creating a plateau for all the legs with channelized rights.

3) Please create more options for medians. On our elevated roadway, we have a raised grassy median. I entered the median widths in the simulation settings window, and when I transferred everything into the 3D viewer, it was empty space (as expected). But because you could see though the median to the highway below, it looked like two separate bridge structures. This is something that we can't present to the public, because it will create a lot of confusion. The only way to fill in the median is to check the TWLTL box. Of course, this creates a median that is roadway colored, with no way to change it. As suggested in another forum post, it would be great to have a pull-down box for median treatment, with options like TWLTL, grass, concrete, etc. It would also be great to have an option for a raised median, and to make it appear 6" above the roadway in the 3D viewer.

4) For channelized right islands, it would be great to have individual control over the graphics. Instead of having a global option to choose the color of the channelized right islands (or to turn them off completely), I think it would be preferable to have a choice (perhaps in the simulation settings) to choose either grassy island, concrete island, just striped island, etc. With this option, we could control the channelized right-turn islands on an individual basis.

5) For turning lanes with a storage length, I typically increase the taper length to 100-150' to make the lane more visually accurate. However, I have noticed that slow moving vehicles (for example, when vehicles are approaching a red light), some vehicles will move over into the turning lane before the full lane width is fully formed. These vehicles appear to be driving over the median (which is sometimes OK, because I am in the greater Boston area), but generally, this sort of thing raises more questions during public meetings. The more times I have to say "that's just a little quirk in the model, but doesn't affect the results", the more likely that people will be suspect of the overall model validity.

6) Lane drops. Right now, the only way to have lane drops is to put in a bend node. You can kind of stretch the node as wide as possible by increasing the crosswalk width on both sides, but the result is still a much shorter taper compared to reality. It would be great to be able to control the length of tapers for lane drops (at least visually, even if the mandatory distance and positioning distance controls remain the same).

7) It would be great to have shoulders and sidewalks, with a space to type in the shoulder width and sidewalk width. This could be just a visual addition to simtraffic/3d viewer, with no need to change any of the actual analysis. But it would be quite helpful at times. The project that I am currently working on, we will have 10' shoulders on each side of the roadway. The roadway bridge mentioned above will be ~86' wide (four 12' lanes, a 6' median, two 10' shoulders, and two 6' sidewalks). We are trying to show the visual impacts of the project with the 3D simulation, but the bridge in the simulation is a good deal narrower (and therefore has less visual impacts), because the bridge in the simulation is only four 12-foot lanes + a 6' median, for a total of 54 feet wide. That's a 32' difference, which is a significant difference.

8) When a roadway is elevated, it looks like it is just floating in space. For the build alternatives (with the elevated bridge), we chose to keep the viewing angle directly overhead, because we thought that seeing empty space below the roadway would raise a lot of questions from the public. It would be great if there were options to either display a retaining wall or a graded slope down from raised roadways. It could be a choice for each roadway segment, and with the slope option, perhaps even an entry for 2:1, 3:1, or whatever slope it will actually be. This would allow us to show the public how much land impact the raised roadway will actually have (of course, the design plans show this, but in our experience, people respond much more to a 3D simulation compared to engineering plans, mostly because the general public does not have a lot of experience viewing and interpreting engineering plans).

9) The creation of tours is difficult and cumbersome. Using the mouse when recording a tour is too herky-jerky (i.e. not smooth), which means using the keyboard controls. Holding down the arrow keys (and the insert/delete for rotating, home/end for viewing angle, and page up/page down for zooming) moves too quickly, and holding the Control key while holding the movement buttons moves things too slow. One suggestion is to have a sliding scale (say from 1-10) that controls the speed of the controls. So if you wanted to scroll over very slowly, you could set it to 1 or 2. This would allow more control over how fast you change the views in the tour. A second suggestion is to create a keyboard shortcut to move diagonally (instead of having the push the left & up buttons at exactly the same time). A third suggestion would be to totally change the way tour files are created. How about allowing you to define the view angle/zoom/position at "Point A", and set Point A to a certain time (say 7:28:30). Then you move around to a different viewing angle/zoom/position and define that as "Point B", with a separate control over the time domain. (for example, you could define Point B to be at time 7:28:45). Then the software would automatically (and smoothly) go from point A to point B in the allotted time between the points. After watching the tour, it should then be easy to edit (say if it was moving too quickly, you could change the time on point B to 7:29:00, so that the tour would go from point A to point B in 30 seconds, rather than 15 seconds).

10) No matter what speed you record the tour, the video clip that is exported always played at 1x. We typically use Windows Media Player to play the video clips, and we often have to set windows media player to play the clip faster. When exporting a video clip, it would be great to be able to set the speed at which the cars move. For example, you could define a 2 minute tour, export the video clip at 2x, and the resulting video clip would only be 1 minute long.

11) When exporting video clips, it would be great if there was an option to overlay one or two lines of text for a caption. It would be great to overlay the text "2008 Existing Conditions - Morning Peak Hour" or "2020 Build Conditions - Alternative 3" or something like that. I think options for positioning (top-left, top-center, top-right, bototm-left, bottom-center, or bottom-right, with the text automatically left-justified, centered, or right-justified accordingly), font, font size, and font color would be enough customization for just about everyone. With the text over the video, it would be clear which scenario is playing.

12) Synchro 7 introduced the roadway geometry into the synchro window (so you could see the lane configuration right in Synchro, instead of having to go back and forth between Synchro and SimTraffic). Now that we are doing many 3D simulations, it would be great to be able to build the Synchro model in 3D. Right in synchro, be able to change the viewing angle, rotate, etc, etc... This would allow us to be in the 3D environment while building the network, and would minimize the amount of back and forth between program modules.

Excellent post!

I'll second that!
Great post

one more suggestion.
In the track mode, it is possible to zoom in/out, and also possible to change the tilt. But it is not possible to rotate side to side. I think it would be great to be able to rotate around a vehicle as it is being tracked. I think it would be cool to be tracking a vehicles while viewing it from the side, or at least have that option.

Thanks.