Civil Engineering, Academia and Visualization with Cody Pennetti

Today’s special guest is Dr. Cody Pennetti, a professional engineer, university-level instructor, and researcher. Cody and Sam have similar stories about how they got into the visualization industry, with both of them being somewhat influenced by their brothers’ work in the animation and gaming industries, respectively.

Cody received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and had an opportunity for an internship doing site civil design work, which included a variety of projects, from retail and residential buildings to pipeline and infrastructure work. After going down that track for a while, he earned his Master's degree in Systems Engineering, focusing on infrastructure design and management. After spending 18 months working on a textbook widely used by universities across the country, called The Land Development Handbook, he got inspired and returned to school to pursue his PhD and do research work.

He got involved in the visualization industry by using a basic workflow that included AutoCAD and Sketchup, but later transitioned to 3DS Max due to better and more realistic results. However, as Cody says, even though we can get much better results now than we did in the past, the civil engineering industry still has a lot of work to do when it comes to visualization.

Sam and Cody talk about what they hope for the future of 3D Visualization, which involves having one software program that will allow us to create the model of a project for all disciplines of the field, as well as why Dr. Penneti does not let go of being a practicing engineer and focus entirely on his university lectures.

Resources Mentioned

Cody Pennetti - LinkedIn / [email protected]

The Land Development Handbook - McGraw Hill

University of Virginia - UVA

Beyond CAD - Website / Vision Weekly Update / Video Updates

Sam Lytle - LinkedIn / [email protected]

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