How to..masterplan

[jtiscareno]

OK guys me and a team here at work are doing a huge masterplan that consists of several office buildings, a "lifestyle center" retail, restaurants, several parking garages a hotel and of course all the ameneties, paths, walks, plazas, water features, grass, etc.
And to top it all off we are modeling in 4 diffrent formats, revit, cad, max and sketchup. I have been very surprised first of all how fast they model in SU and the models in the end are so easy to handle with only one multi-sub material per building and they are lite.
But to the question, first the site is huge and like I said it has a lot of stuff, I tried first to tackle it in cad, it was taking me forever just to create good clean plines for solids (even using boundary or region) so I jumped to max imported the plan and I wanted to trace over to create plans etc, but as soon as I trun the snap and try to do a line bam! it takes forever, now I can cut it up in section but...
So first question, what is a fast (no going for precision) way to develop a huge site?
After having everything done, we plan to xref all individual bldgs into one mastefile in max but I have started to see that except for the SU files all other drag the file way way done.
So second question, what is a good way for working on huge files with many buildings and stuff, like I said, trees, cars, people and entourage will be done in photoshop to cut down on time and size.
And third item is, any ideas, tips, past experience horror stories in regards to developing images for a big masterplan complex...
Fina render will be done in Vray and I do have acces to a decent render farm using backburner 2 but we dont have distributed rendering on vray on.
Thanks a bunch, I am starting to bring in the kleanex for when I start to cry later, LOL.

[Dynedain]

Simplify simplify simplify

First figure out what shots you want, THEN model only what's necessary for each of those shots. DO NOT try to model everything and then pick your shots, it will take forever, your files will be huge, and your render times will go through the roof.

[percydaman]

what he said. also good cad prep is helpful. we have a great cad person here who can quickly create all the walls and such in cad from the original plan, import it into max and just start extruding immediately. I suck at cad so I usually just clean up what i can and then retrace in max. Split up as many of those dwg's as you can.

[jtiscareno]

On dividing the buildings we have that covered, probably half has been done in SU (I hate to admit it but SU is damn fast and the model in max is small as hell), the others have been done in cad, max and revit.

In regards to selecting the shot and then model it sounds logical and I know that is the first rule of 3d "dont model what you wont see" but what about the aerial shot, that is one we know we must have...

[DaForce]

I have found recently that using snap on an object with lots of certs brings max to a crawl. I was using it on a mesh smoothed object.
And given you probabaly have LOTS of verts in your lines that could very well be the problem.

[olitech]

jtiscareno,
hi, we deal almost exclusively with masterplans...
here's some tips:
-terrain first
-buildings second
-trees, cars, people last (in that order)
Depending on how big your team is, everything gets built in parallel of course. Sometimes we start with low poly bldgs first, populate the masterplan, then place cameras. Once cameras are set, we check to see how the models hold, then swap and delete as necessary.

Once the rough buildings are in place, we save select them out and use as a template for placement. You can then continually refine your bldgs this way, then just merge them back in and you're done.

It really helps to model a high and low poly version of the buildings (time permitting). By low-poly, I should say *med-poly, since these are usually good enough for the aerials. Obviously you can't always do this, so be prepared to render in layers- terrain, then building layer, trees, etc...hope yer pshop guy is patient! This way, you can update models till the end and still make it.

Since we netrender everything (anims and stills) we avoid xrefs altogether. We don't always have time to comp animation layers, so most of what we do is 1-shot rendering.

To avoid snapping to a million verts, we place points on the terrain and just snap to these. However, depending on how big (or small) your masterplan is, sometimes you can just freestyle it.

The tree guys can plant using the terrain model while the archs are building their buildings, car guys same thing.

When planting trees, we've been using proxies...pick your tree types, convert them to proxy (before planting!), then instance them all over the place...same thing all the way to people.

*these days we just use the med res bldgs for everything...even high res stills! use textures here as much as possible, but keep them low-ish res.

whew! sorry for the long post...but there you have it. Masterplan factory 101.

Oh, the most important thing if you ever want to see your family again...make sure you've got a great quarterback! He needs to make sure he knows exactly what and where things are going ALL THE TIME. It's super easy to get overwhelmed and miss something and this is usually what the client will find right away!

here's some examples:
www.bahrainbay.com (masterplan design by SOM, modelled rendered by us. i like this one =) +- 1,500,000 polys (and about the same in proxy form)
www.riffaviews.com (dv/cg mashup...nice golf course terrain, tonnes of villas/trees...one of my faves) +- 560,000 polys +no proxy
www.thedubaiwaterfront.com (older, some cheesy bits, but some goodies-lotsa cool aerials) who knows...too old
www.thepalm.ae (our first icon masterplan project. an oldie, but a goodie...don't know if the site's been updated this year, but have a poke around)

Good luck!

[geoff]

Nice work olitech especially the Bahrain Bay one.

Geoff

[olitech]

hey! thanks Geoff!

talk soon ;]

[ene.xis]

olitech:
nice works there

and great input about ur workflow....

[olitech]

my pleasure! glad i can finally help...

oh. you guys ARE looking at the 'videos' right?

[sjmoir]

Yes, I'm looking at the videos! Fantastic work, very polished.

[claude_tnt]

make sure you've got a great quarterback!"

" The tree guys "

" car guys same thing.

very nice master plans... what kind of time do you have on one of these projects??

hrmmm.. maybe i'll may just become the cleanup guy....olitech.. do you need a janitor??? i think i know how to empty garbage.. and sweep and do windows....

thanks da

[mikeeee2]

Great work! who do you work for?

[jtiscareno]

Wow olitech great work first of all and then many many thanks for the great workflow organization on masterplans...next time I will defenetly start on site first before anything else.

Well in regards to the team we are only five but making the most of it, and of those five only me an another guy are full time on it (others have more work) but SU has saved the day for low res light buildings and he is even doing the site on it. Site was a mess from original cad dwg.

Can you explain some more the vray proxy 'planting" method? I have read an read the vray proxy stuff but can not seem to get a clear handle on the process.

Again thanks!!!

[olitech]

sjmoir, ene.xis: all about the teamwork! thx! and especially thanks to SOM who kindly supplied us with base models and of course this forum...we keep trying to streamline the workflow every time...so much comes in that we can't always perfect it.

claude:
usually we have 3-4 weeks (sometimes2)...and we rotate, so sometimes i'm the janitor ;] (my favourite job)

mikeeee2: my team! =]

jtiscareno: thanks
5 is good, each time u do one, everyone gets better and faster! next time, one guy will do the job of 2...hopefully
We try to learn with each one.

We're still getting used to proxies...so i'm no expert.
Here's the thing with proxies: before we used them, we would plant trees with either an rpc sprayer script (not rpc trees! ick), or scatter tool, or whatever...Now that we use proxies, these methods don't seem to work with it, but the geometry savings kind of balances it out.

To make a proxy (vraymesh) just right click on your geometry and go to 'vray mesh export'. Just remember to make the location somewhere where your netrenders can find it...it's kind of like an x-ref, but without the hassles (and poly count!). Also make sure the object is all attached as much as possible.
Do this BEFORE you instance the geometry around your site...this way you keep your file lean and mean.

"the leaner, the meaner" i just came up with that now!