modelling detailed terrain from autocad info.

[t3dm]

Hi All,

I have a bit of a challenge ahead..I have highly detailed cad survey info in the form of polyline contours. I need to recreate the landscape.. (we are doing an aanimation over of a couple of golfcourse holes)whats the best way to approach this...I have used the terrain tool in max before but remember it being rather fussy..

any pointers at this stage.. just linked the cad info into the model. Will be rendering in VRay for speed and to make use of its good displacement for grass .. might want to consider a fur system too for creating long grass that moves in the wind..

help!!

[studioDIM]

use a normalise spline modifier on your splines, before using the terrain mod.
This will create vertices mid-segment for your splines, rendering you a much denser, much cleaner mesh for the terrain.
Look out for the normalise SIZE. too small on a big spline will cause max to hang about for ages, creating zillions of vertices.
Try the normalise on a small spline first

Lele

[Clifton Santiago]

Get all your splines moved to their correct elevation and you have a variety of ways to create the landscape. You can use the Terrain feature, or the Spline Cross-section combined with surface modifier. Or you can convert them to Nurbs splines and do a U-loft. Whatever you use, if the resulting terrain is messy, or too high-poly, just create a subdivided plane and drape it over the terrain with the Conform compound object. Be sure and set the conform offset to 0.

[t3dm]

Okay,

we have alot of spline cleaning up to do!!

used the terrain modifier to varying degrees of success before.. like the idea of using the conform modifier.. as i want to have a very tidy poly that I can slice up and manipulate as I have to create a variety of grasses, short and long and scoope out sand bunkers etc!!

will keep posted with my progress!

[Clifton Santiago]

You're modeling golf courses? I'd like to see the results.

Keep in mind you will want to hide the wrap-to object when you do the conform.

Also, I usually make the plane subdivs at about twice the size I want for the final mesh, conform it, then add a turbosmooth modifier with 1 iteration to smooth and average out the kinks.

[Erik N]

A quick and not necessarily dirty, but somewhat unprecise method of going about this, is to create a max terrain from whatever contours you have (provided the lie at the correct height of course), and then render a giant Z-depth image from the top view of this, using the resulating image for displacing a plane. This will give you a nice and orderly terrain with square polys. This way you can even choose where you want it highres.

[t3dm]

again thanks for the tips! fancy going down the displacement route... but need to be pretty accurate as I will have some architecture to put in too.

its the first time for us to deal in detail with this amount of terrain.. !!!

will keep you all posted..

oh and will need to post later.. and discuss methods of creating a range of grasses from short.. to rough and to long grasses that wave in the wind!!! maybe some vray fur???

yep.. you have guessed it.. its a golf course..[/img]

[tricky]

An old thread, but why start a new one?

I have a land survey in 2D autocad format. Essentially, I want to create a mesh that I can 'drape' over the surveyed points, typing in the z-values where they have been measured so that the 3d draped mesh will start to approximate the lie of the land. I don't really want to enter all the z-values as there are zillions of them - just enough to convey a sense of the landscape and then run a turbosmooth (or something) on the result to smooth out any kinks.

What tools do you guys use to do this?

[Neilg]

I just dont do them all.

Drop a few in at important points (if a slope is fairly steady, you only need one either end - if it's in the background and covered in plants, keep it vague, etc), then edit poly & model with edge extrusions. It takes longer to set up, but i find having a clean mesh with edges that follow where i'd want them to go comes in useful much later on. You can cut sections out of it and edit it easier, but it depends how much of that you'll be doing.
You should have a contour line you use to see where you need the points. or if you've got it as a 3d cad file it makes modeling over it much easier, because you can just skip as many as you feel and only put edges where theres a big change.