3dmax line work

[iceman478]

if anyone can help with this question i will really appreciat this....

i am rendering a city scape or view of an entire university ...i have the extruded blocks of the buildings but i want to leave the site map as lines...how would i make lines show in a render....?

[Thablanch]

toon shader could be an option

Ink and paint shader can give some quite good result as well

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Will depend to some degree on what format the ground is. Some ideas of varying ease and quality:

 

- use the site map as a bitmap texture on the ground. Will probably need to be many pixels depending on how close you will be to it. This will tend to smear on the steeper slopes.

 

- If there are splines as contour sources kicking about in a corner somewhere, use them and turn on "renderable". Give them as much thickness as needed to show nicely. I made mine rectangular, not very wide but tall enough to show. I don't quite like the results here but it may work better elsewhere.

 

- Make a vertical map of horizontal stripes. I tried a gradient ramp and a bitmap. Liked the bitmap better. Used a cylindrical uvw because it was easiest for me to understand positioning. Takes some extra filtering and smears on shallower slopes (see near shadow of 'S').

 

And now that I reread your question, I'm not sure I've been answering the same one you've been asking.

[knbfoster]

If the lines are editable splines then just select the splines and click on the modify tab. Inside that is a rendering tab. check the box that says "enable in renderer" You can adjust the thickness and color of the splines manually but if you render you will see the lines. Hope that helps.

[adricorrea]

You can also sweep them

 

Select all of the lines that you want to be visible and group them (optional), then apply at sweep modifier, from there you can make them cylinders or squares, etc.

 

It is a very useful modifier:)