Topography Modeling

[Devin Johnston]

I have a project on a 48 acre site; the site is very hilly and will have about 12 different buildings connected by roads & parks. I haven't dealt with a site like this before and I'm not exactly sure how to tackle it. My first thought was to use some USGS DEM elevation data and import it into Vue to get at least a rough model of the area, but I'm not sure if I can find the correct location and if I can how much additional work will need to be put in to bring the model up to the right amount of detail. My second thought was that perhaps there is a modeling program out there that is better suited for this than 3D Studio Max or Vue is, but I don't know if I have enough time to learn a new program. I know some of you have had to deal with this before and I'm looking for any advice on what the best way is to tackle this job. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Aaron2004]

If you have a topo map that the land developer did in CAD, you can use those splines in 3D Studio.

[Sawyer]

The best way I have found for modeling a site is to go through the normal steps used in creating a terrain object but then creating a really high density plane and using the conform tool to have that plane blanket the terrain. Terrain objects need special attention to spline vertex placement and I have never gotten a topo that would give good detail in that regard. But please update with what ever you find.

[Ernest Burden III]

I have a project on a 48 acre site; the site is very hilly and will have about 12 different buildings connected by roads & parks. I haven't dealt with a site like this before and I'm not exactly sure how to tackle it. My first thought was to use some USGS DEM elevation data

 

What do you have to work with from the designers? If they have good topo lines that's best, even though its never a 1-2-3 and you're done thing. They are either not detailed enough, or you have splines not at height, or thay have 100K points packed in which generated too many polygons to work with.

 

However, the USGS data can be quite useful. I've used it extensively. Your site may be on a very detailed sheet, or not. It varies, and it also varies whether there is good aerial imagery to go with it. What is your timeframe? I have a great program for reading USGS datasets and combining ones of different types (vector raster and heightfields). I could look at the site for you, just not today or tomorrow.

[classix]

Hallo

If you own autocad perhaps this will be interesting for you:

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/google_earth_extension_beta/

This plugin can extract scaled terrain data from google earth. Low res but maybe a good basis to start with.

 

Marcus

http://www.einherzfuerpixel.de