Landscape problem...

[fatsober]

Hi Guys I'm new to the forum so first of all, hello!

 

I'll try to keep the post as concise as possible...

 

I have a large historic landscape project underway. The first part has gone to plan. The contour data was generated in a/cad exported (linked) into Viz, spline normalised -> terrain, no problem.

 

So I have my base landscape. However part of the brief is to display the land (field boundaries etc..) as was recorded in the mid 18thC. We have accurate geo-referenced fields which have also been created in a/cad and overlayed onto the contours.

 

But I can find no way to "drape" (for want of a better description) the new splines over the existing terrain. They obviously come in on a flat plane. I have tried various options such Itoo's glue plugin but this dosn't work. What I'm trying to do is overlay the new fields as a layer, or individually, but can find no way to accurately have the splines/mesh/patch follow the surface terrain created from the contours..

 

Can anyone suggest a way to do this or a plugin that may help?

 

Many thanks in advance

[Dave Buchhofer]

Rendering to a map and projecting down as a texture, booleans set to cookie cutter, blurscripts planter script.

 

All else fails, divide and conquer. break the splines into smaller chunks and use itoosofts glue tool, then reattach them

[fatsober]

Thanks...re using Itoos glue that was my first thought and how I had planned to do it. The broken splines glue to the surface fine BUT when a texture is applied it doesn't take account of any terrain under the middle of the 'field'. So the edges of the spline follow the terrain but bits from underneath poke through the rest of it..

[alrawli]

You could make a seperate flat plane and use shape merge to cut the splines into this, then use the conform tool in the compound objects drop down to drap this new plane over you existing terrain.

[fatsober]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

I couldn't get the cookie cutter to give me very good results - but shapemerge is not a function I have used often and as the project is quite time critical I don't have time to get to grips with it. The conform tool sounds like the perfect solution but I'm guessing this is in max..for the moment we're running VIZ.

 

However, booleans have provided a solution.. I extruded the field mesh to above the terrain and the cut -> refine the two. Edited the mesh to remove the top vertices from the extrude which left the inside of the extrude with the vertices from the terrain and then capped the holes. They will take a little jiggling to get right but is has given me the field shapes to work with on the terrain. It's probably not the best way of doing it but has worked so far. Thanks again for the replies gave me a new angle to think through the problem which I seemed to have managed to solve (sort of )

 

Geoff