merging terrains + question about viewport performance

[jensandersen]

Hello

 

Sorry for all the (probably) newbie questions, but:

 

First of, my viewport performance, at 1.1mil polys/verts, is terrible now that i have copied my house a few times (im making row houses). I have tried to switch viewport to direct3D instead of the standard one, it helped a little but not much. And now i also tried setting up the copies to just look like boxes. But still only 4-7fps and like 10 in wireframe mode. Any tips? (the copies are only the outerwalls and such, nothing inside them really).

 

Second problem is my terrain. I have the whole area created now, but i want my houses to "dig in" to the ground, so i need to cut away some of the landscape. I drew a smaller plane and conformed it down on to the big landscape, hid the big landscape and turbosmoothed the new and smaller plane so i could adjust it nicely (see attached pictures). Now i would like to join the old big terrain with the new smaller detailed one i made. But i cant seem to get the proboolean to work. Is there some other tool or am i just using it wrong?

 

Im stuck here as i also need to create some paths/walkways infront of the houses.

 

Any quick links to tutorials or what so ever is also more than welcome so you guys dont have to explain everything, im more than happy to learn.

 

Thanks

[YOHKOH]

Hi Jens

 

Not so sure regarding your viewport performance but terrain being displayed may be clogging it up.

 

Regarding the terrain. It looks like you have a dense mesh which you are trying to join to a less dense mesh ( the bigger terrain). I would avoid using booleans wherever possible and attach the two objects using edit poly attach.

The problem you will have is if the meshes are different it will be hard work to weld the vertices and make it tidy. So you may see a join line when you render. However this probably wont be noticeable.

 

Do you actually have to merge the two terrains together into one object?

Set up you the views you want to render now and then you will see how much of an impact any problems will actually have.

 

You could take your new dense mesh

- Edit poly

- Select outer edges

- Extrude outer edges to extent of you big terrain

- Delete the section which covers the detailed mesh

- Conform to big terrain

- attach and weld back to detailed mesh in edit poly.

 

Of course this will mean you have a higher poly count.

[jensandersen]

Hi YOHKOH

 

Thank you very much for the quick reply.

 

Performance doesnt really change much if I hide the layer with the terrain on. It might just be my macbook pro from 2010 who struggles with this amount of polys. Guess a 512mb GPU isn't that amazing any longer...

 

The join line shouldnt be a problem with some photoshop work afterwards im sure. I would like a view from a distance, so i guess i could just cut delete the polygons in the area "underneath" the new dense terrain and not join anything if it looks okay on renders. I will also try your advice regarding conforming again - but wont it mess up the new dense terrain's "new look" that i sculpted?

 

I tend to always use way too much time googling solutions available when i probably just could have done it in a more "manuel" way. But im telling my self: "if you use loads of time to find a great and fast solution now to the problem, you will also have it available for the next problem!"

[YOHKOH]

Thinking about it.

 

A simpler way would be to delete the area of your detailed mesh from the big terrain, attach as an edit poly.

 

Then take a brand new plane, divide it up to be of medium density and conform it over the whole lot. So you would end up with one nice clean mesh object conforming to both terrains.

[jensandersen]

of course! That will probably be the way to do it. Thanks yohkoh. I will just try and work through this low fps for the next two weeks as the project is due at the end of this month, then take a look at a new workflow or a new laptop.

 

Have a great weekend.

[MrCAD]

check out the below link ... it helped me improve viewport performance..

 

http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max--3ds-max-design-2012/new-nvidia-29610-driver-much-more-less-lags-viewports-isnt-it#p260898

 

for me 296.10-desktop-win7-winvista-64bit-english-whql helped with my gtx 470 ..now I can work with 10 million polys easily

 

good luck

 

Meher