contours to landscape mesh

[super gnu]

i know about the terrain generator in max, but are there any other options when dealing with very complex contour data? i have a large landscape composed of many many contours (10cm spacing) and over 5 million vertices. since closing all the open contours (or even finding them) would probably take longer than just manually modelling over the contours.. i.e. forever.. and it just falls over with the model in its current state, the terrain object in max isnt really an option.

im perfectly willing to use another application if anyone can suggest one that does a good job of heavy contour data and open contours....?

[sduck]

Have you looked at RhinoTerrain?

http://www.rhinoterrain.com/page392-0-products.html

[chicoone]

http://populate3d.com/news/populateterrain-released/

Maybe useful?

[super gnu]

hi guys, thanks for the input. i tried populate:terrain, but it really doesnt seem to like heavy contour data and lots of subdivisions. i made a siple landscape contour set and it meshed fine at 50x50 subdivs. cranked it to 500x500 and it sat there for hours. the landscape i need to create will be in the 10s of millions of poly range and i just dont see it working at all.

thanks for the tip regarding rhino terrain though, i shall be investigating that asap.

ive also requested a trial of psycode terraincad. we will see if that can handle it (but its only a 32 bit app so dunno if it will keel over with such a large source dataset.)

[flino2004]

What I do is creating the terrain in Rhino Terrain after that i use grid so it creates a pointcloud grid and after that I create a single surface from those points...the main reason is because it's smoother since the terrain is a nurb instead a mesh.
the grid depending how dense you want...you still can split the terrain in large pieces and create different pointclouds with different densities to have more detail where you want to have it.

to convert the points cloud to a nurb there area several reverse engineering tools and i think there is a tool for that in MAX in autodesk labs.

Fernando

[beestee]

I am preparing to work with a 3d terrain right now and considering giving the beta of SplineLand a try. Anybody have any experience with it yet?

[Morne]

can't AutoCAD Civil do this automatically?

[super gnu]

that "splineland" looks pretty promising, although from past experience you can pretty much forget documentation or solid support from those guys.. i have vraypattern. karba appears to be quite a programming wizard, but i dont think the rest of the organisation matches his skillz.


btw.. stay well away from "terraincad" you have to pay 20 quid for a 7 day trial, and it was super flaky. it refused to install on win7 64 and when i put it on a 32 bit machine it crashed out on even very small pieces of my big old landscape spline set.

i ended up splitting my spline set into 8 chunks, opened 8 instances of max, with the affinity set to one core each, then ran a "populate terrain" in each max on a piece of the spline set. 42 hours later i had my complete mesh, 5 km x 3 km, meshed at 1mx1m res. (with some overlaps)


this then gave me a nice legible landscape, over which i (and my team) poly modelled by hand, because it just wasnt good enough - any near vertical elements were simply stepped messes.


i think the problem is, unless you are doing mountain ranges or something, contour data just doesnt cut the mustard. my landscape data featured hard landscaped elements, creases, paths, and roads.

[beestee]

can't AutoCAD Civil do this automatically?

Max can do it nearly automatically as well, but I am specifically concerned about the cleanliness and efficiency of the triangles.

I have used populate before and it works very well for cleaning up a terrain mesh, and I might use it here as well, but i am just curious about SplineLand since I have not seen much about it.