**2. Automatic generation of 3D models**

As aesthetic value is important for civil engineering projects, which impact urban and natural environments, it can be incorporated in curricular programs in engineering schools. However, the attention to structures traditionally dominates in the modern day university education of civil engineering, and the teaching of aesthetics meets obstacles. The main difficulty is the thought that aesthetic values are unfamiliar to engineers. This leads to the need for the formulation of main aesthetic thought into clear principles and rules that will help designers to learn and apply aesthetics to their design work.

Because aesthetics must be a part of the program for a bridge from the very beginning, this consideration must become the responsibility of every bridge engineer and must be an essential part of bridge engineering decisions at every step of the bridge design process; aesthetic consideration must be integrated carefully into the design of each detail of the bridge and its approaches [3].

To allow an easy and accessible evaluation of the visual appearance of a bridge, an intuitive tool to generate 3D models of bridges was developed. The application is an important tool to stimulate the diffusion of aesthetics in engineering projects and to simplify and support its analysis. The computational application allows the introduction of geometric data and organizes them in order to create three‐dimensional models of the bridge. It also allows the user to generate the usual technical drawings required in the graphical documentation of a bridge design.

The computer application developed supports two bridge types: overpasses and box girder bridges. The computer application generates 3D models based on DXF format, an exchange code recognized by many CAD systems.
