single house - need help with driveway

[Stan Zaslavsky]

Hi guys,

 

see enclosed an image i'm working on - its a house on a bit of a slope.

 

havent put in scenery or anything like that - that can all come later.

 

my main question is - is there a way to create a driveway that follows the slope?

 

cheers,

[Claudio Branch]

Draw a rectangle in your top viewport and position it where you want the driveway. Select the slope object, go to Compound Objects and from there use ShapeMerge. Select the rectangle and it will merge into your slope geometry.

 

Now you can collapse the whole thing down to Editable Poly and select the faces within the rectangular boundary to make them your driveway.

 

You may even want to slightly extrude them and add an edge chamfer.

[Scott Dombrowski]

Welcome to the world of imperfect site work. I'd love to hear other's suggestions for this, but this is how I handle it for now...

 

1) In plan view, draw a closed spline outlining the shape of the driveway.

2) Extrude that spline a distance greater than the height of your slope.

3) Make a clone copy of your terrain object (not an instance)

4) Making sure that your extruded spline completely intersects your copied terrain object, place a boolean modifier on the terrain and pick your extruded driveway as operand b. Use the "Cut/Remove Outside" operation and you should be left with just the part of your slope that remains inside the driveway shape.

5) Now you have an area where there are double faces (the driveway object and the terrain object), so to clean that up a little you could either just move the driveway object up a smidge, or you could:

5a) make a clone copy of the driveway

5b) go back into the boolean modifier and change the "Cut/Remove Outside" to "Cut/Remove Inside" and it will remove the faces from where the driveway is.

6) Rinse and repeat.

 

It would be great to hear other methods for doing this, as I'm finding that while this works in a pinch, it can get a little messy when trying to match a smooth curb to the terrain. Extracting the edge from a terrain object to use as a path for sweeping a curb usually results in something that looks like the road construction crew was all on crack when they poured the concrete.

[Stan Zaslavsky]

i did exactly that - its looking a little better - thanks guys

 

and thats a great description of what happens when i try to get a curb happening

 

any suggestions re curb?

[WAcky]

A curb can be done by drawing the profile of the curb and either sweeping/lofting or extruding that shape.

 

A driveway is a different story. I suck at splines so it took me ages to make one. I'll see what i can find.

 

Edit: My original ones f'd. Im going to learn nurbs and make another one.

Edited July 17, 2008 by WAcky

[Scott Dombrowski]

I started making a few screenshots to show how to do a good curb on a flat site, but then remembered that I learned that from the Visualization Insider series here: http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/VI/default.asp. That's a great place to start. It's the site work on varied terrain that I'm still working on perfecting (or even getting to look halfway decent).

[Stan Zaslavsky]

thanks guys - yeah unfortunately there is a fair slope on this site and to make a curb look real i think will be a challenge.

 

i've gone through the Visualisation Insider - it was a great tute - but it was all work on a flat site.

 

i'll get my hands dirty in photoshop - let's see what i can do

 

cheers,

[Stan Zaslavsky]

ok well here is a test render that i've now sent on to the client. i'm not totally happy with it - the reflections on the windows are non-existent

 

and i'm still not getting how i can get a nice sunny day in mr with a nice sky background - so i had to resort to photoshopping the background.

 

 

looking forward to some cheer-up comments

[shaneis]

...and i'm still not getting how i can get a nice sunny day in mr with a nice sky background...

 

Here you go, http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

(about half-way down the page)

 

Spend some time on that site - plenty of excellent info straight from the horse's mouth...so to speak.

[Stan Zaslavsky]

thanks Shane - believe me - i've been spending all morning on that site

 

fortunately the client is happy with the way it looks so far - he was only looking for an "artist's impression" - at least in my opinion it's an impression ... don't know about artist.

 

thanks again for the tip - i'll keep working on that image separately to get the sky better in any case.

 

cheers,

[Stan Zaslavsky]

at least for my next render - i've worked out the curb/road site work

 

oh yeah - I've decided I love Soft Selection

Edited July 28, 2008 by StanZ

[birdman67]

Looking good...the concrete curb shouldn't flare out to meet the asphalt though...it should be vertical, meeting the horizontal asphalt, although for the purpose of this rendering/view it's probably just fine the way it is.

[SandmanNinja]

That's looking really great, Stan!

[Stan Zaslavsky]

Thanks Joel - its getting there. it's all about constant improvement

[Parker1]

No need to get the sky perfect inside of MAX...just render to a .TGA (or other embedded alpha file type) and select the alpha channel in Photoshop. Now you can place any sky you want behind your image and tweak it to perfection.