max 2011 terrain soooo weak

[mikeh]

I do simulations for a civil engineer. I typically make the terrain meshes in EaglePoint, an autocad plug-in. The terrains are made from 3d polylines. Once i have the polylines, EaglePoint will take about 10 to 20 minutes to generate the mesh, depending on the size of the mesh.
I took a simple set of 3d polylines into max 2011 and selected them then hit the "terrain" button. That was twenty four hours ago and max is still trying to make a mesh out of it. What a weak POS max's terrain tool is compared to the acd software.
So now i go back to the old way of generating the terrain in cad and then importing it into max.
Just a small rant.
mh

[Subburb]

Hi used recently the terrain tool to make HUGE terrain...
The polylines (levels) were coming from autocad, and needed some adjustments :
- all polylines coming from AC were not smoothed (all angular vertex, can't modify that.)
- too much points into polylines.

I used this tip :
edit each line, and apply "normalize spline" modifier to make it smooth, and to control the final number of vertex into it.

Then use the terrain tool.

Hope it helps !

[mikeh]

i took the exact same file into our earthwork guys software called "Agtek". It created a 3d model in less than 20 seconds. It exported that model as a tin in less than 30 seconds. Now i'm importing it into max. I wonder how long max will take to import it. Max sucks at large terrains...always has.
mh

[mikeh]

...and that exact same tope brought into civil 3d took about 8 minutes to create and export. "Ag-tek" is such a fast piece of software.

As usual, it is impossible to import large terrains into max as one whole piece. On one machine, max had only accomplished about 10 percent import of the topo over a 24 hour period. On a second machine, with a stripped down version of the topo, Max was still struggling away 12 hours later. These are new 64 bit machines with max 2011. I usually break the topo up into bite size pieces to import, but i thought i'd see what the new max could do on "faster" machines with new windows OS. Now i know. It's business as usual, and i'm back to carving up the topo into smaller files to import piecemeal. One topo will break up into 10 to 20 files to import each seperately. Tedious as always.
mh