Went to Cardiff yesterday on the train. Went to talk BIM with some of our (Carillion) chaps and some clever bods from ARUP. Learned a bit about the A465 Heads of the Valley dualling project and more specifically Section 3 Brynmawr to Tredegar that Carillion and ARUP are jointly working on. The project soon goes to Public Enquiry.
I was suitably impressed with what I saw and heared and thought I’d share. They have an excellent website which you can visit at http://www.a465brynmawr2tredegar.co.uk/ giving all the info including drawings and stuff. A copy of the layout drawing is included below – click to open pdf in a new window.
I was mighty impressed with the flythrough animation that ARUP produced and that can be viewed on the website. I have embedded it below too for your ease.
It is by far the best one of these that I have seen thus far and I especially like the trees. It was said that the modeller asked what species of tree where to be used alongside the new road and purchased pre-drawn model objects of the right ones. He even trimmed the foliage when the landscape architect said they were too bushy. Fantastic.
I was also told that at the public exhibition the model was set up on a PC with games controller and adults and children alike took great pleasure in driving up and down the new road as they wished. They were probably not so fussed about the road but it was a great way of gaining interest (I’d quite like a go myself!).
I like the animation so much I managed to get a copy of the file (356MB) as I’d like to use it to show school kids at events that I do. I was also shown a traffic model animation of before and after which was equally impressive. Got a copy of that too!
I was also impressed with the school outreach that the guys had already been doing. I liked the ‘Retaining Wall’ activity they did and will copy/develop that for use over in my patch.
It amused and pleased me to see on their main ‘schools’ page that two of the three photos of school kids on the left were photos I had taken at schools events I had done – but that is great as we do a lot of stuff with schools but don’t always get decent photos to take away.
All in all it was a very grand day out.
andrew kenyon photography 