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Shopping Plaza


stylEmon
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Hey folks here is one I worked on a couple weeks ago. They made me stop until the cleint replies, so it looks like I'll be working on it again next week.

 

I would like some tips on intergrating the background. I'd like to use images, not models, to set the plaza in. Thanks

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When you're making a photocomposite, you need a cracking photo to start with. The final image is only going to be as good as the photo. Take a look at Hayes Davidson. They do montages better than anyone else and I bet they pay the photographer better than anyone else as well.

 

Do you have a site photo?

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You have a good start on a demanding exterior scene.

 

The third image shows the surrounding terrain map prominently. I believe that your final image will greatly improve by getting a much higher-res image.

 

You can export hi-res images from Landiscor, Google Earth Pro or probably best, just purchase what you need from a third party. Purchasing is a good option if you have enough budget to work with. I would recommend making a huge composite aerial image and then breaking it up into smaller parcels that correspond with the terrain geometry. I have done this myself with extremely large sites.

 

See the attached, it is a 25 sq mi monster site...

 

If you are only doing stills, then you might just comp in the background. The drawback to that is each view has to be done with camera-matching, opacity blends have to be created, etc. If you are doing animation, then you will want to use a sky-dome and an opacity blend to minimize the obvious hard edge where computer horizon meets computer sky...

 

As for your other texture, which is distracting because of the obvious tiling, I recommend creating your own custom texture with a digital camera. Either a medium sized one that will tile well or a huge one that needs no tiling.

 

Experiment if you can and Good Luck!

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Thanks for the comments and help. So Cluadio, how did you render the topography in your example? Can that geomerty easily be translated in to maya/max?

 

We have some site photos, and a autoCAD topography file (Z axis included).

 

I am pretty crafty with my canon digital rebel, so I could take some more high res images (off the clock of coarse).

 

None of the photos we have is a birds eye (like the 1st and 3rd image). What I was thinking of doing was taking elements from our site photos, cutting out objects (hills, foreground shrubs, paths) and compositing them in the scene on planes in 3d. Kinda like a photogrametry tutorial I've seen. I just don't have a whole lot of time, and I don't want to have to resort to a plan B.

 

I am still working with the procedural texture in maya to get the ground cover to look better. Maybe a layered shader is the answer in this case...

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The topography started out as series of 16 separate TIN's (triagulated irregular network) that were imported into Max and then mapped with the corresponding textures. It's all just triangles...I'm sure this works in Maya too.

 

Your best bet maybe to stick to views at ground level. Like Tommy mentioned earler, a sharp initial background image will make your end result pop!

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I got files like this, but haven't quite had enough time to figure out how to make them useful.

 

On this proj, I just read the different elev points from the survey and made blocks to represent different elevations within the site. From there, I pulled verticies until the ground plane matched the blocks. Make sense? ... :D

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It looks like the linework at the bottom is the site layout or perhaps designation of land parcels? The dots above appear to be generated from a point file with an orange area of local survey points that have already been triangulated into a mesh.

 

That's my best read of it anyways...

 

Triangulating all of those points and then draping them with a hi-res aerial will give you nice terrain geometry. That is what you would probably want to use if your client needs an animation.

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