Traffic Import Troubleshooting

Here are some problems you might encounter when importing traffic data, and the solutions to them.

Why aren't my FZP files accepted by the Civil View Import Panel?

VISSIM can export a wide range of data fields to an FZP file. Only a small number of these are used by Civil View, but most of these are required. See Preparing FZP Files in VISSIM.

Why isn't the Random Body Color Assignment feature working in the Vehicle Substitution Manager?

If you add your own vehicle definitions to the Civil View libraries, they need to be set up in a particular way in order to support random body color assignment feature. See Material CivilViewVehicles.

How can I improve the speed of the Parent Surface Tracking feature?

Applying surface tracking to large numbers of vehicles can be time consuming. The number of faces in a parent surface has a direct effect on the amount of time required to perform the surface-tracking operation. To optimize the process of applying surface tracking in Civil View:

• Make sure that you assign surface tracking only to material IDs that represent the surface material of your highways. This allows Civil View to ignore faces on the surface where vehicles should not trave.
• If you are unable to identify specific material IDs on your parent surface, try physically dividing the surface into separate objects to help make sure that a minimum number of faces exist in any parent surface.
• When you import traffic data, use the Step Interval control to limit the number of animation keys generated per vehicle. Surface tracking must be assigned individually to every animation key, so halving the number of animation keys on each vehicle halves the amount of time required to apply surface tracking.

My imported traffic data does not match the location of my imported civil-design data. How can I transform the imported traffic into the correct position?

Third-party traffic data is not always created in the same coordinate system as the civil design data. You might need to investigate the coordinate systems used, and possibly experiment to find the XY transformation settings to apply to the traffic data. You can set these transformations in the Traffic Simulation File Import Panels.

Even if you have chosen the correct transformation settings, sometimes you might need to apply a slight shift globally to the imported vehicles or to rotate the imported vehicles globally to account for an inconsistent north direction in the source traffic data model.

Manual transformations are easy to apply using the standard move and rotate commands in 3ds Max Design, but be careful to group the imported vehicles before you apply any manual transformation. Remember to ungroup the vehicles after you applying a manual transformation, and before you add any surface tracking or vehicle substitution.

After importing traffic data into Civil View, I don't see any imported vehicles in the viewports. What went wrong?

Check the full extents of your 3ds Max Design model. It is possible that the vehicle data was imported to a location that was unexpected, and lies outside the current views.

I can see my imported vehicles in the viewports, but there seems to be no animation associated with them. What went wrong?

Check the full extents of the timeline in 3ds Max Design. It is possible that your animation starts before or after frame zero, depending on the Scene Start Time Shift setting specified in the Traffic Simulation File Import Panels. Track View is also a useful way to inspect animation key data assigned to 3ds Max Design objects.

What is the meaning of "bearing"?

A bearing is a horizontal angle (direction) expressed in degrees measured clockwise from north. Bearings are used in Civil View to describe the driving direction of vehicles at a given moment in time.

The Surface Tracking Manager Panel is not having any effect. What went wrong?

Check that there are no flipped faces on the tracking surfaces. Every face has a normal direction, and it is essential that each face point upwards for the surface tracking process to work correctly.