Best way to do site design?

[RyanSpaulding]

Hey guys,

 

I've become really irritated with building site plans in MicroStation lately. How is Max for doing site work? I need an easier solution for doing site design with relief than I already have. Any tips, tuts, advice you can point me to?

[IceAged]

Have a play about with the Terrain feature under 'Compound Objects'. You can use splines to model 3D terrain, or if you import existing 3D terrain data from AutoCAD, it will generate a mesh for you.

I've used it a few times with varied degrees of success. Sometimes the terrain just doesn't fit the building, and it's necessary to adjust the mesh in places to get it to fit. It can be a case of trial and error, and another problem is the size of the terrain mesh, which will make the file rather large. I find it easier to hide the mesh from the viewport until I am ready to render it, (keeps the viewport clear).

Hope this is of use.

[RyanSpaulding]

Will do. There's also a viz insider which I'm going through. Seems to actually be FASTER than MicroStation which i didn't expect.

[Ricardo Eloy]

I normally don't use the Terrain object... I find it very...uh...unpredictable. I've using another approach for a few years now. I create the base mesh using the simple curves I get from CAD. Then, with the basic heights extruded, I simply lay a cloth object (reactor or cloth) on top of it and wait until it conforms to the base mesh. It's quite easy and I always get a nice, clean quad mesh in the end.

[RodT]

how much topo do you have? what is the scale of the project? i've found that often it doesn't really pay to spend a lot of time on terrain modeling as the camera doesn't often pick up topo unless it is severe. i've not tried rick's idea, but i certainly will....

[RyanSpaulding]

Well, a lot of our work is design/build, so the architect wants to see the grading, redardless if it's easier to make flat or not. In fact, our viz work rarely includes final polished renders. 90% of our biz is the ability to start a project right away, and get it done fast for meetings and approvals.

 

I'll look into that cloth technique. How do you seperate the roads/sidwalks from say the curb, grass, ect?

[Spooner04]

I've done terrains before by redrawing the the topo lines in Max using splines and then using the cross section modifier to join them. The only painful part is making sure that the splines have the same number of vertices. Over a large terrain it can get to be a pain.

 

It's basically the same concept used in the "Modelling a Knight" chess piece tutorial. Except for the cross section modifier keeps you from having to connect vertices manually.

 

Rick's method sounds much easier. How easy is it to modify afterwards?

[Justin Hunt]

For the pavments and roads use shape merge to cut out the geometry from the toppo. Be careful though your mesh can get quite messy

 

Other than that it just straight polymodelling. Gives detail where needed and is very quick

 

JHV

[3danim8d]

Ryan,

 

If you are in Microstation, do you have access to InRoads or GeoPAK ?

 

If you make the site in InRoads, you can draw the triangles and save them as a DWG and import them into Max.

 

 

Jeff

[Ricardo Eloy]

Rick's method sounds much easier. How easy is it to modify afterwards?

Actually it is very easy. Once you have a clean quad mesh, you can do pretty much whatever you want on it. I normally use shape merge to creat the roads and stuff, although there was an oldo plugin called Glue (or something like that) by the same guys who did Forest Pack that could create a line's projection on a mesh quite easily. Not sure it still exists, but I'll check it.

Update: Yes, it still exists. Here it is (and it's still free!)