Large Terrain Cleanup/Painting

[jujubee]

It needs to be fairly detailed so a displacement map would be out of the question. Plus, items need to be positioned on top of the terrain fairly accurately.
One thought would be to manually subdivide the terrain into separate quadrants then try to manually tackle the sections individually through optimizations.
Then they might be rejoined.

For now, I had a new terrain created via Civil3D for me but it's still heavy.
Scripts like Populate Terrain still produced errors.
Various optimizers got the file size down but it's still quite a bit messy.

Trying to conform a plane to the existing terrain in the hopes that it will produce quads.
Unfortunately it's taking hours to process, most often resulting in errors.

[raymarcher]

I think populate cannot handle the complexity of the terrain.

In Max use this script to slice the civil terrain in 4 or if needed 8 pieces:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/topplaneslice

Export each part to Meshmixer to repair unwanted topology which populate probably cannot handle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgBrt-vQvdQ

Export back to max and run populate on each part.
Export that back to Meshmixer to weld those pieces back together.
Export back to Max.

[Paul Oblomov]

Render it with krakatoa PRT surface and then render

[Preisler]

@Voltron7

What I hate most dealing with splines from autocad are all the vertex points we have to clean up. Can SplineLand handle that easily?

[voltron7]

@Voltron7

What I hate most dealing with splines from autocad are all the vertex points we have to clean up. Can SplineLand handle that easily?

To answer your question; short answer = yes
Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but when I run normalize spline, about 50% of the time, it totally kills 3dsmax.

The developer recommends applying normalize spline first. I have not noticed this to help, yet, and actually, just normalize spline, has made max crash a bunch.
So, I now skip that part, and usually the Splineland handles the contours fine, without any cleanup, but YMMV.

So, for Splineland, my workflow has become, import Autocad and collapse all elevation lines to a single spline.
Save a copy, and run Splineland. Keep iteration down to 8-10 for the first tests.
Important thing that I asked about on their forum, and actually got a fix within hours (still amazed.)

splines should not share borders
in the following example
1. incorrect
2. correct
3. correct

Hope that will help anyone trying it out to avoid some frustration!

So far, it has been used successfully in 5/5 jobs.
No affiliation, just hope others might benefit from this plugin.
I used to use Populate terrain (FREE) a lot, but this one is just ,more robust, IMO.

[alexyork]

Some great tips there, Voltron. Going to bookmark this thread for future reference.

[voltron7]

Thanks Alex,

Also, Alexey Duk has some helpful or at least informative video tutorials on you toob.
Probably spent less than a whole day getting comfortable using Splineland, and watching videos, and trying it out.

I should also mention, it is working fine with max2014, even thought the installer looks for up to 2013, just redirect to max2014 root instead...
No idea when or if it will get updated any more but I really do hope so!
For me, the best part is the interactive ability for your linework, i.e. platforms.
Your walkway gets changed one day...no problem. Dumpster pad got relocated to other side of building, no biggie!

[Preisler]

Thanks for Your in depth feedback Voltron7!

Yes, if you want Max to crash Normalize spline is the way to go ...I never use anymore!. It´s better to redraw it all in max - which is what we do for most jobs anyway.

Maybe I should have asked for workflow tips instead because it seems wrong that one have to spend so much time cleaning up drawings - especially when both programs are from the same supplier

Anyway we just bought SplineLand and are waiting for the license file now

[raymarcher]

Alternatives to buggy normalize spline:
http://www.vg2max.spb.ru/uniformspline.htm
http://www.maxplugins.de/max9.php?pa...32&sort=Author "HSPLINE"
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/cleanspline

Or if you have acces to AutoCAD maps you can use some of its native cleanup tools.

[voltron7]

@ Preisler, You bet, and hope you are successful with the tool
@ raymarcher, Great addition of script links, thank you!