Civil Engine Coming Soon
Civil Engine is a new software application brought to you by the creators of Beyond Typicals to enable efficient 3D visualization of your civil projects
This is NOT BIM or Digital Twins
This is NOT BIM or Digital Twins
This is Interactive 3D Visualization Clear Communication Photorealistic Animation
This is Interactive 3D Visualization Clear Communication Photorealistic Animation
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Prerequisite: Base Models
In Civil Engine, base models created in SketchUp and InfraWorks serve as foundational layers for high-quality, photorealistic visualization. These preliminary designs are refined and detailed in Civil Engine with realistic textures, 3D assets, lighting, and interactive elements, transforming them into immersive visualizations that enhance project presentations and stakeholder engagement. The Beyond CAD team will soon be offering 3D modeling services to help turn your project files into high quality base models.
Advanced Traffic
Civil Engine’s advanced traffic system supports vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, and rail, offering flexible customization and control. Users can place and customize paths, refine assets from an extensive library, and precisely manage merge and diverge points. Enhanced with intersection controllers and dynamic adjustments, this enables realistic, comprehensive traffic representation across complex project scenarios. Baked traffic enables linking of traffic assets with camera for the perfect production.
Powerful Paths
Civil Engine’s path placement system empowers users to create and edit paths node by node on any surface, offering granular control over traffic assignments, 3D assets, and safety elements like guardrails, barriers, and fencing. Users can add pathway arrows, striping, and pavement markings, enabling detailed and precise visualization for transportation designs.
Robust Asset Library
Civil Engine’s 3D asset library boasts over 700 assets, including city furniture, trees, vegetation, construction items, decals, and more. With customizable, dynamic assets like animated construction equipment, users can enhance visualizations with realistic, context-specific details, transforming designs into vibrant, interactive environments. Place, scale, rotate, organize and customize hundreds of assets to add realism to your scenes.
Realistic Textures
Civil Engine features a meticulously curated library of realistic textures for civil projects, with special focus on asphalt, concrete, and soils. Our team has dedicated hours to refining these textures, ensuring authenticity. Additionally, a unique wear path system enables users to add realistic road wear, enhancing visual accuracy and immersion in every project.
Civil Engine’s powerful phasing system lets users visualize detailed project phases by integrating paths, assets, and dynamic assets using phasing buttons or with a GANTT chart representation for clear scheduling. This system can also present various design alternatives or hide assets selectively to manage frame rates, ensuring smooth performance and efficient editing while showcasing complex project timelines and options.
Visual Experiences
Civil Engine’s immersive visual experiences feature a robust camera system for both stills and animations, an intuitive Presenter mode with customizable, minimal UI for real-time presentations, and dynamic 1st and 3rd person navigation (called ‘Explore Mode’). These tools allow users to communicate projects interactively, bringing designs to life for impactful client presentations and in-depth project reviews. Telling the story of your project has never been easier.
Photo Compositing
Civil Engine’s photo compositing feature enables users to import real site, drone, or aerial photos, match camera perspectives, and create seamless blended composites directly within the platform. Perfected in Beyond Typicals, this tool enhances realism by integrating designs into actual site imagery, providing clients with a clear vision of proposed projects in real-world contexts.
Emphasis on civil
Designed with transportation projects in mind, Civil Engine is equally equipped to handle a variety of civil project types. From transit, site civil and parks to rail and pedestrian pathways, its versatile tools and specialized features adapt to any civil design, providing powerful visualization and modeling capabilities across all project scales and types.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most frequent questions and answers for Civil Engine
What is Civil Engine?
Civil Engine is a specialized 3D visualization software designed for transportation and other civil engineering projects. It enables professionals to create high-quality visualizations quickly and efficiently without the need for prior technical expertise in 3D modeling or media production.
Who is Civil Engine for?
Civil Engine is designed for civil engineers, planners, designers, and visualization specialists who want to streamline the process of creating detailed 3D renderings and animations for transportation and other civil infrastructure projects.
How is Civil Engine different from Beyond Typicals?
The Beyond CAD team launched Beyond Typicals in early 2022, achieving successful adoption for 3D design and visualization in transportation planning and engineering. While Civil Engine also enables efficient 3D visualization for transportation and other civil projects, the two tools are fundamentally different.
Beyond Typicals operates on a “Section” paradigm and requires no prior data or models to get started. It is designed for straight sections ranging from 50 to 1,000 feet.
Civil Engine, on the other hand, follows a “Base Model” and “Asset” paradigm. Users must begin with a high-quality 3D base model, which we recommend preparing in SketchUp or InfraWorks before importing into Civil Engine. Unlike Beyond Typicals, Civil Engine can visualize a wide variety of transportation and civil projects, including intersections, roundabouts, interchanges, and more.
We anticipate many Beyond Typicals users purchasing licenses to Civil Engine and plan to offer bundle promotions accordingly for more affordable purchases.
We plan on offering 3D modeling services (create base models from design files) in 2025 for users interested in using Civil Engine but lacking these capabilities internally.
What files can I import into Civil Engine?
Civil Engine supports .obj and .fbx file formats for base model imports. We recommend preparing your base models in SketchUp (preferred) or InfraWorks before exporting them into Civil Engine to ensure optimal results. While some users may successfully import directly from other software like MicroStation, OpenRoads Designer, Blender, or 3ds Max, we do not officially test or guarantee quality results from these workflows.
Additionally, Civil Engine may not fully support global geolocation. To avoid issues, we recommend assembling all design, existing, and terrain files in SketchUp or InfraWorks and aligning them to the point of origin before exporting to Civil Engine.
Once the base model is imported, additional objects such as light poles, pavement markings, or buildings can be added as 3D assets in .obj or .fbx formats.
How does Civil Engine compare to other 3D visualization engines?
There are a number of 3D visualization engines and workflows that can be used for a variety of project types. Many of these are built for architecture, video games or other industries or are complex and require a high level of expertise in 3D visualization and art. Civil Engine differs as it is built specifically for transportation and other civil engineering type projects and with a lower learning curve that complex 3D visualization software. Features like advanced traffic with intersection controllers, a linear Path system for placement of elements such as barriers and pavement markings, dynamic assets like construction equipment and traffic signals, Path cameras, Explore mode (walk/ride/drive your project), a 3D asset library built for transportation projects and a host of other features separate Civil Engine from these other tools and workflows.
That said, Civil Engine is not designed for any industry other than transportation and other civil projects and will likely not be the best option for architecture or other industries. Also, those using more complex and advanced workflows (like 3ds Max to Unreal Engine, for example) may find Civil Engine limiting and might not be the best option for these more advanced creators. Civil Engine is a very specific tool for a very specific user, and we understand that it may not be the best option for some users trying to visualize their projects.
What can Civil Engine do?
We are extremely focused on making Civil Engine fit its purpose of a more efficient 3D visualization engine for transportation and other civil projects. Our goal is to make users with high quality base models go from import to fully visualized and photorealistic image and video renders (or interactive demos) as efficiently as possible. Because of this, other potential uses of this technology will likely not be a priority. For example, because we are focusing soley on 3D visualization with Civil Engine, we don’t plan on having ‘BIM’ or design functionality like quantities, cost data, measuring systems, publish to CAD or PDF or other features more common with BIM and design software. Civil Engine is also not focused on GIS so global geolocation, data visualization, direct DEM support, or other GIS features also are not a priority.
We recognize that some potential users may prefer Civil Engine to include more non-visualization features or offer greater flexibility in integrating with other workflows. However, our mission is to create a highly efficient 3D visualization engine specifically for transportation and civil projects, and we remain focused on achieving that goal. We understand that Civil Engine may not be the right fit for every use case, and we fully respect those who choose alternative solutions that better align with their needs.
How much will Civil Engine cost?
Over the past three years of offering Beyond Typicals, we’ve learned valuable lessons about pricing and licensing. Our goal is to make our software accessible and affordable for users while maintaining a highly focused product that stands apart. Civil Engine is designed to save users hundreds of hours annually through efficiencies that are unmatched by other tools.
Creating and refining this product has required thousands of hours of development, and we will continue investing in its improvement and support in the years to come. The revenue generated from sales enables us to sustain this commitment and deliver ongoing value to our users.
For 2025, the pricing for Beyond Typicals will be $2,099 per year for individual licenses. As Civil Engine is a more robust and advanced product, we plan to offer it at $3,099 per year for individual licenses. For organizations interested in floating enterprise licenses, please contact us for more information.
We plan to offer several promotions in 2025 for Civil Engine pricing including existing customer, bundle and upgrade promotions.
What are the hardware requirements for Civil Engine?
Civil Engine is a powerful 3D visualization engine built on Unreal Engine, requiring high-performance hardware similar to what is needed for high-end video games. For optimal performance, we recommend:
- GPU: An NVIDIA RTX 3070 or better. While this is our minimum recommendation, having the best GPU possible will provide a smoother and more efficient experience, especially for larger projects.
- RAM: At least 16GB of RAM, though more is ideal for complex visualizations.
- CPU: A modern multi-core processor is recommended to handle the software effectively.
- Storage: At least 30GB of free storage, along with adequate space for large project files and renders. SSDs are preferred for faster file access.
For users without access to high-end hardware, we will be offering Civil Engine Cloud, enabling browser-based usage. While this eliminates the need for powerful local hardware, there are important limitations to consider:
- File Handling: You will need to upload base models and assets before importing them into the project.
- File Downloads: Rendered images and videos must be downloaded, and these files can be significantly larger than those typically seen with Beyond Typicals.
Both options provide a robust visualization experience, but a high-performance local setup is recommended for the most seamless and efficient workflow.
The world needs a better 3D visualization engine for transportation projects
Beyond Typicals is becoming industry standard for creating visuals for transportation projects, and is now a stable, version 3 product. Users love the ability to quickly build out street and bridge sections using drag and drop functionality, 100 (or more) feet at a time. While we will continue to improve this product and support our growing user base, there is still a gap in the market for better 3D visualization for imported design files (like Infraworks), intersections and complex transportation projects.
In 2021, we introduced Beyond CAD, a photorealistic 3D visualization engine built on Unreal Engine for transportation projects that was set to solve this problem. While Beyond CAD found some early success, it wasn’t as cohesive a product as it should have been. Knowing this and wanting to focus all of our efforts on the success of Beyond Typicals, we paused development of Beyond CAD for a time.
We are now ready to revisit solving this problem and are excited to announce the spiritual successor to Beyond CAD, Civil Engine.
Civil Engine represents a significant evolution from what Beyond CAD was, offering a superior solution to the challenges faced by civil engineering professionals. Leveraging the foundation laid by Beyond Typicals (and not Beyond CAD), Civil Engine embodies a comprehensive 3D visualization engine, powered by Unreal Engine 5.
Imagine the ease and power of Beyond Typicals, but with the ability to visualize your imported 3D engineering designs, like Beyond CAD sought to do.
Civil Engine is not a refinement of Beyond CAD, but a complete reimagining of our approach. By forking the codebase from the proven framework of Beyond Typicals, Civil Engine inherits a solid and cohesive structure while introducing groundbreaking advancements. With a renewed focus on imported 3D designs, primarily sourced from Infraworks and other civil engineering software, Civil Engine will empower users to visualize complex projects with unparalleled precision and efficiency, while also feeling familiar in UI, textures and assets to Beyond Typicals users. Built for transportation design professionals, Civil Engine will have a core ‘Path’ placement system that will be used to linearly place traffic, 3D objects, cameras as well as other static and dynamic assets. This Path paradigm will be fundamental to the speed and realism needed for rapidly visualizing transportation projects.
And for the many Beyond Typicals users that have been asking for the ability to visualize intersections, Civil Engine will provide that and more.
Our development team is diligently working towards a 2025 launch for Civil Engine. We invite you to stay informed about our progress by signing up for updates below.
Thank you for your continued support as we strive to redefine the standards of 3D visualization in the civil engineering industry with Civil Engine.
Sincerely,
Founder, Beyond CAD Incorporated
Understanding the functionality of Civil Engine
While both Beyond Typicals and Civil Engine will offer efficient 3D visualization for transportation projects, they operate under different paradigms. Beyond Typicals relies on a drag and drop system of pre-made sections. Assets are attached to these sections, and other changes can be made to materials and other aspects of the road sections. With Beyond Typicals, there is no need for existing data to import, which makes it an incredibly accessible tool to jump right in and get started.
Civil Engine offers a much wider range of possible project types and other visualization features, but comes at the cost of needing a good 3D model of your project to get started. We refer to this as a ‘base model’ and it can come from InfraWorks or Sketchup (other workflows may work, but will not be encouraged). We are diligently working on refining these workflows as well as getting a better understanding of how 3D design models can go from Autodesk or Bentley products into either InfraWorks or Sketchup as necessary.
We are also excited to announce that we will be offering services to create 3D base models from customers design files in 2025. We will refer to this group of artists as Beyond CAD Studios.
Once the user has a base model ready (either through their own work or from our Studios artists), it can be imported and textured in Civil Engine in preparation for other steps in the visualization process. Where Beyond Typicals uses the section + asset paradigm, Civil Engine uses a base model + Paths and Areas paradigm. The Path system is incredibly dynamic and intuitive and each path can be placed one node at a time on the surface of the base model. These paths can be used for everything from vehicles to pedestrians to guardrail to trees and even pavement markings using any of the dozens of path ‘presets’. After the paths are placed, assets can be assigned and customized, similar to how assets can be assigned to sections in Beyond Typicals. Paths will be one of the defining systems of Civil Engine because the linear nature of transportation and other large civil projects lends to a linear placement system of traffic, assets and other elements.
The Paths system is core to what makes the Advanced Traffic System possible. After placing paths with traffic, intersection controllers and other features (like merge/diverge) can be used to create a dynamic and customizable network of paths to efficiently represent traffic for your project on the base model. The traffic library (which vehicles or people show up) can be customized per path or globally, along with other values like traffic density and speed. Traffic isn’t just vehicles, it also includes pedestrians on foot or bicycle along with various types of rail. All of these traffic types can interact with each other (much like the real world) through the intersection controller and other features of the system.
To tie traffic to cameras and other publishing tools, Civil Engine offers an innovative and cutting-edge traffic ‘baking’ which allows users to record and edit the positions of all vehicles and pedestrians to ensure the right traffic is in the right place at the right time for your render.
While the traffic system of Civil Engine cannot replace true simulated traffic, it is the most realistic representation of traffic in a photorealistic engine to date.
The Areas system is similar to Paths, but for enclosed surfaces. This will be the most efficient system for placing trees, grass and similar 3D assets that need placing in an area rather than along a path.
Assets and other elements can also be placed, adjusted and edited individually as necessary.
Dynamic assets builds on what is already possible within Beyond Typicals with animated construction equipment, customizable traffic lights, custom buses and trains and much more.
A hierarchy system works to efficiently organize all paths, areas, assets and imported base models. Foldering and phasing is possible within the hierarchy as necessary for project needs. The phasing system can be used for phases, project alternatives, or even for just organizing projects as needed.
Basic rendering tools put image and video renders at your fingertips, including the much celebrated feature of Beyond Typicals- photo compositing.
For more advanced visual experiences, the Civil Engine Publisher is a robust system with a number of tools to most efficiently present your visualized base model. Camera creation, Presenter Mode, GANTT chart phasing and even a video editing style ‘Sequencer’ are all available within the Publisher section so that users can give full visual experiences and productions without ever leaving Civil Engine.
The Publisher also includes a ‘Publish to Web’ feature for an additional cost that allows users to render image and video cameras (including 360 views) and automatically publish them to a website for quick and easy sharing.
A custom and familiar UI ties all of this together, along with our excellent customer support and 3D modeling services to (finally) make efficient and accessible visualization for transportation and other civil projects possible.
- Advanced traffic system (vehicles, pedestrians, rail)
- Easy and dynamic path placement
- Customizable traffic libraries (per path or globally)
- Intersection controllers for complex movements and signal timing
- Auto placement of traffic signals with intersection controllers
- Merge and diverging of paths
- Articulating trucks (single/double) and trains
- Pedestrian/cyclist animations that stop/start as necessary
- Traffic animation baking to tie vehicle and pedestrian movements to cameras
- A dynamic Paths system for traffic, asset placement, fencing, rail and more
- Use any of the dozens of path presets to quickly place traffic, 3d assets, fence, barrier and more
- Assign multiple assets to the same path for powerful combinations and incredible efficiencies (imagine trees + tree grates or traffic + construction cones, for example)
- Add, adjust or remove nodes for any path or even extend previously placed paths with new nodes
- Place striping using path presets for solid, dashed, double and more
- Color-coded path visualizers can be turned on and off in editing for quick reference
- Pathway arrows can be turned on for any path to communicate various traffic movements
- An Areas system similar to paths, but for enclosed areas and surfaces for efficient placement of trees, grass and other objects
- Importing of base models or other 3D assets is possible through .obj or .fbx files (InfraWorks and Sketchup recommend exports) with a number of importing options including units, scale, rotation, texture import and more
- A 3D asset library of more than 700 hand-picked photorealistic models for transportation and other civil projects
- Hundreds of trees, bushes, flowers, cacti and other realistic nature assets
- Transportation-specific assets like highway lights, guardrail, delineators and more
- Construction-specific assets like barriers, equipment, signs and more
- Buildings of all types including multi and single family residential, commercial industrial and even generic white buildings
- A large selection of pavement marking symbols including arrows, BUS, BIKE and more
- Shadows off for striping and pavement markings
- Dynamic assets build on what’s possible with Beyond Typicals, adding even more for Civil Engine
- Animated and customizable construction equipment including an excavator, backhoe, dump truck and more
- Flashing signs including RRFB, overhead and more (turn them on, off or other options)
- Dynamic traffic signals with lights that actually flash color based on user customization
- Adjustable arrow boards and dynamic message sign (DMS) with text box (multiple fonts) for highly customizable construction phasing and traffic control
- Basic building block shapes with customizable texturing for more advanced building
- Dynamic people placement with options for selecting the character and animated pose
- Save customized dynamic assets to send to other users using the proprietary .bca file format (similar to .bta files in Beyond Typicals)
- More dynamic assets are planned for possible development before launch
- Photorealistic textures with focus on transportation and other civil projects including detailed and seamless asphalt, concrete, soil and other materials
- Detailed striping and other pavement marking textures for better realism
- Wear paths are on by default for traffic paths for added realism
- A robust and proven hierarchy system for organizing assets, paths, areas and imported base models
- Organize and reorder all elements of a scene, including folder and sub-folder organization
- Lock, rename, turn visibility on/off, delete or phase any element or folder in the hierarchy as necessary for highly ordered projects
- Organize and texture base model sub-mesh components as necessary
- Adjust time of day, clouds and background colors to get the right aesthetic look for your project
- A phasing system even more robust than Beyond Typicals for full phases or alternatives
- Phasing can also be used to turn off certain elements while editing (like large amounts of trees) for faster performance
- A GANTT chart system can be used to tie phases together for full rendered productions without need for post-processing
- A number of included example projects to explore and learn more about how Civil Engine works
- Basic rendering for quick image and video renders (using the same system as Beyond Typicals)
- Make image and video photo-composites easily within Civil Engine by importing project photos and camera matching the 3D model (similar to Beyond Typicals)
- Camera controls in the bottom left (similar to Beyond Typicals) allow for quick camera customization
- Scene effects make blueprint or other rendered looks possible
- The Publisher section of Civil Engine unlocks advanced camera and visual experience options
- Set up, name and organize dozens of still or animated cameras
- Attach cameras to paths for efficient path cameras
- The Presenter mode allows for a customized and minimal UI for presentation of visualized scenes in group settings
- Touch controls allow for navigation of Presenter mode on touch devices for public presentations
- 1st and 3rd person navigation is possible for walking, cycling and driving vehicles using keyboard controls or gaming controller
- The Sequencer allows for advanced video editing within Civil Engine and ties together cameras, phasing, baked traffic, sound and more for full rendered productions, eliminating the need for post-processing in video editing software
- Basic features include file saving, auto-backup, undo/redo and more
How to Use Civil Engine
Intro to Civil Engine Alpha (Sketchup)
Civil Visualizing with Sam #00 (Sketchup)
Civil Visualizing with Sam #01 (ORD/Sketchup)
Civil Visualizing with Sam #02 (ORD/Sketchup)
Civil Visualizing with Sam #03 (InfraWorks)
How is Civil Engine different from Beyond Typicals?
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Drag-and-drop 3D typical section creator (PC application)
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Adjustable heights and widths of any section
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Section length adjustment from 10' to 1,000' (100' default)
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More than 100 preset road & bridge section types
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Library of more than 500 placeable 3D assets and decals
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Additional customizable/animated 3D Dynamic Assets
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3D Asset Expansion Packs (Metahuman)
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Change surface textures of sections with 40+ materials
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Auto-generated and customizable labels
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Auto-animated traffic that can be paused or disabled
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Customizable traffic libraries (cars, transit, bikes, pedestrians, etc.)
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Preset and custom retaining walls
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Underground utilities of any size
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Animated and colorized pathway arrows and area highlights
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2D & 3D camera controls including pan & orbit mode
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Render PNG images and MP4 videos in 2D or 3D
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Photo layer import & compositing
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Import 3D files (.fbx & .obj) for custom assets
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Imperial and Metric units
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Edge section locking and width bound guides
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Environment controls (sun, clouds, gradient background)
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Rapid file saving and loading
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Phasing system for alternatives and construction staging
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Multi-section vertical layout mode
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Scene effects for aesthetic styling
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60+ Example Projects
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Free online and one-on-one support and training
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Visualization engine built just for civil projects (PC Application)
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Requires 'Base Model' from Sketchup or InfraWorks
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Advanced traffic system with intersection controllers
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Powerful Path system for rapid and dynamic asset placement
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Flexible Area system to quickly place assets on surfaces
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Robust 3D asset library with over 700+ objects
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Dynamic assets including animated construction equipment
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A meticulously curated library of realistic textures
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Phasing system for project staging, alternatives and more
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Highly flexible still and animated camera system
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1st and 3rd person views to run, bike or drive your project
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Photo compositing system similar to Beyond Typicals
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Traffic baking to tie specific assets to cameras
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Striping and pavement marking placement using Paths
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Customizable digital message signs and traffic signals
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A Sequencer that allows for video editing-like publishing
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A hiearchy system for organizing assets, paths and more
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Solid save files, auto-backup and undo/redo
Civil Engine Facts
- Published by Beyond CAD Inc.
- Standalone PC application built on Unreal Engine 5
- 25-30GB download
- Alpha version released in Fall 2024
- Beta version planned release Winter 2025
- Public version planned release Spring 2025