brendanrogers

export the problem objects out as .fbx and re-import them and reset x-form, convert to edit mesh etc.

Try importing the FBX model and see if its still happening.

If your working from DEM maps, you should be able to take it into globlmapper and output a heightmap. You can then import that into Terragen, 3dsmax, or probably world machine for adding detail. Of course its only going to be decent for background sceneries then.

Sounds like a pretty decent setup to me. You may want to make that your main machine again

Lots of tutorials online explain this topic. You could also look back through some posts on this board. You may also need to tell us what host software you are using 3dsmax, maya, blender? For 3dsmax, have a look at this HDRI dome tutorial: http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/show/9029/tip-vray-dome-and-hdri For your render settings, turin GI environment OFF. Set your workflow to irradiance map and light cache to start with. Change your render filter to Vraylancoz instead of area. Thats just some settings I remember. Now you can setup Vray many different ways, so maybe someone else will share with you their workflow too.

You may be able to do similar things in Photoshop. But Substance Designer lets you setup a workflow so you can generate new textures easily. this is a good example of a brick generator. I plan to have a generator for each major type of material in my archviz library. So I can load up wood floors, adjust to my clients samples and generate the normal and specular maps with ease.! Substance designer gives awesome normalmaps, something hard to achieve in Photoshop. Nvidia plugin doesn't really give you an accurate map.

Your tests look pretty good! I havnt used world machine or VUE but i reccomend Terragen 3 for its ease of use and supported formats. A mask is just a black and white image (most of the time) that denotes where a texture should be distributed. You should be able to use a mask on features such as height and slope for example. but you could also try and mask out areas of interest like soil/dirt/grass from a satmap texture. And then try and re-build it in one of the programs your looking at. I abanonded the use of DEMS with sat maps as well, much too low res.

I use Globalmapper too for DEM and other terrain data conversions. However Its only going to look as good as the data you get in, which in my experience hasn't been good enough for the type of high-res backgrounds hes after. It might be an idea to try and use a mixture of your terrain scanned textures (in my experience not high-res enough) and then blend in some layered procedural texturing based on the slope angle as well as image masks from the scanned textures to use with your procedural layers. You could import the data into Terragen as a heightmap and then blend in procedural layers using the image masks (from the sat data) to give detail and output higher res maps. It also has the ability to output .HDR sphericals and .EXR files which can be used in your lighting setup with Vray. http://planetside.co.uk/images/rapidgallery/slides/54c9f34fcfe74b2e8a4a084bd0988342~ryana-archer_mountain-lenticulars-v3-large_lightroom.jpg

Try world machine or terragen 3. http://planetside.co.uk/products/terragen3

Vray RT doesn't want to work with my radeon 290x..

Substance Designer can create some great photo-real looking textures for use in archviz. Stone, woodfloors, brick etc, all with detailed normal and specular maps. It does take some time to create these textures so can slow down a project if your making them especially for a project and not just your library. But I recommend checking out this program, its quite brilliant.

I recommend both Quixel and Substance painter for direct model painting. Both are great programs and aim to do the same thing. I think most Archviz people work towards a deadline and don't really have time to add this kind of extra detail. However, if your building your own models anyway, you would get benefit from using either of these. I'm using Substance designer at the moment to create PBR textures, great program, lots to learn and the output is simply quite amazing. Interesting vid showing of the use of both substance programs for viz like applications.

Yeah as mentioned before, it can depend on the actual technique of the Revit user. I find a lot of extra vertices in walls which I'll tend to remove. I find round columns to be the worst and generally re-create those.

I basically do what S. Gru mentioned. Reset x-forms, then collapse objects and re-texture. Then prey they don't want the model changed

FBX is always going to be the better choice for going into 3dsmax. In the FBX export dialog box, you an choose to set the scale of the model to compensate also. But make sure you got your max units setup correctly. We use millimeters here not inches