Populate:Terrain released! Create and retopologize terrain surfaces.

[mcnamex]

great product cheers m8

[Bathyscaph]

Thanks for sharing the script! I am sure I'll get some use out of it.

[peterguthrie]

just used it on a job, worked perfectly and saved valuable minutes (of messing around with planes,conform,shapemerge etc)

thanks again!

[duke2]

It's incredibly slow, but I like it!

[beestee]

I am working on a massive scale project and this utility came in very handy. The most useful thing I did with it was to retopologize a giant walkway that has many different sized/shaped reveals in it that I could not get to cut cleanly any other way, ran your utility on the surface then I just did a boolean operation for all of the openings and it worked flawlessly. It might just have been my imagination, but as a nice side effect it seemed to me that once some of the larger objects were retopologized to the grid pattern, the scene ran much more smoothly!

Great work Marc!

[Shimakaze]

I tried it now and it solved a problem I had worked on for a couple of hours in just a few seconds. Very cool

[plastic_]

Glad that it seems useful!
If you like it, please "+" it on scriptspot:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sc...pulate-terrain

I need more plusses.

It's incredibly slow, but I like it!

There are specific situations where it almost crawls to halt, when vertices hunt around for their place on the surface. I'm heavily optimizing my code right now and there are already great improvements. Version 2.0 will be a lot faster.
I have a test scene where it's 8sec vs 800sec improvement. I'm also trying to cache some operations for the realtime preview, to make it more responsive.

[plastic_]

Here is a teaser of what's coming in Populate:Terrain 2.0.
Voxel surface generated from point clouds (Points or Mesh/Spline verts).

This will allow clean surfaces from even the dirtiest imported CAD terrain data.
Since only verts/points are used, it doesn't matter if the contour lines are broken, or if there are issues with the mesh topology.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Pretty interesting...
U know vue right ? - maybe u could thinkg about implementing an texture height map so we can get some interesting textures or sumthing like that?
Thanks, ciao.

[plastic_]

Pretty interesting...
U know vue right ? - maybe u could thinkg about implementing an texture height map so we can get some interesting textures or sumthing like that?
Thanks, ciao.

I never used VUE, but it's more a visualization tool/earth simulator, isn't it?

What I'm interested in is the retopo/meshing part. My aim is fixing terrain modeling issues in archviz situations, also dealing with imported CAD data.

Texture height map, do you mean color gradient changing over elevation on the generated surface, or building the surface from a given heightmap texture?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Both actually.

Vue - yea sollutions for environments.

They build that nice ECO population system that based on height/slop/angle and so on will adjust textures from smooth grass to rocks and so on.

Might be interesting to have it here too as an alternative... I'd love something that is build in 3ds max and has a scalable properties and not that alien thing that vue is making...

[skogskalle]

I made some quick tests with populate last week and its really cool... will definetly try it out on the next project that requires some heavy landscaping!

When do you think 2.0 will be out? The voxel-thingy looks great, although the relaxed version seems a little too relaxed (it looses the highest peaks here and there).

k

[glorybound]

I was having issues using it. If I have several opening in my mesh, the script would just fill the holes with a new mesh, and not mesh over anything else. I would want, and need, it to work the other way, most of the time. Am I doing something wrong? I love the script, otherwise, and would donate tot he cause!

[plastic_]

DADAL,
thanks for the suggestion, it's not too difficult to assign vertex colors based on angle/height etc rules. I have to think of a way to handle this easily, the hardest part is a good UI and the material handling.

skogskalle,
yeah, relax doesn't keep the bounds unfortunately. But it can be pulled back with scale/ffd. Maybe there is another way...

Bobby,
check the "keep original border" option, it should do what you need. If not, please show me the mesh.

[raymarcher]

sweet, you could check out RhinoTerrain for inspiration, they have a free trial. Rhino itself also is available as a trial.