Terrain and road. Please help

[pettermathisen]

Hei peeps.

Look at attachment. I got this model of a pretty big terrain. And a model of the road.All imported from archicad. The road is a slab. The terrain is made from architerra, and SOSI info.

 

i want to be able to make the model of the road fit the terraing. Almost "glue" it to the surface.

 

doing this makes it look strange because of small diffrences in the hight of the terrain, where the "road" hits. making it follow the terrain and not making the road surface horizontal straight. hope u understand what im writing.

 

anyone have a good ide how i can do this?

 

you can see the second attachment. i made the roads, but this way with splines and each road segment as one object, fitting the terrain to it with push and pull. but this was VERY time consuming. and connecting the roads with verticles.

 

Any tips and tricks. Been searching google and youtube, but not the ideal solution for me. maybe one of you have a good solution for this?

 

Please help

 

 

 

Cheers Petter

 

[Nicolai Bongard]

Do not be suprised if you cannot find much info about dealing with sosi files as afaik that is a file format that only norwegians use (leave it to us to create ridiculous standards that make no sense and works way worse than the stuff it is based on just for the hell of it).

 

Itoo soft has a plugin called Glue that can align a spline into a surface in 3ds max. Then you can use sweep to create a road, alltough the sides of the road will not be aligned to the terrain, so it is only a half decent fix.

 

Architerra is supposed to have a road function that can generate hills on both sides of the generated road, you may want to try that.

 

Another method you can use when creating terrain in Archicad (if you do it manually with a mesh tool) is to draw your road in plan view with a slab, then create another slab that covers the area that is not supposed to be road minus the other road slab. Then you take your terrain mesh and use a solid element operation to carve out the road, then you select the other terrain mesh and assign it some asphalt material and use another solid element operation to carve out everything that is not the road. Now you have a seamless transition between the road and terrain. However what you also get is a road that is not level from side to side. There is afaik no easy fix for this, however what you can do is set the side and bottomn surface materials of your meshes to be something else than the grass and asphalt materials (just so that they are easy to select and delete in 3ds max). Then you export it to 3ds and import to 3ds max, then you convert the two tops of the meshes to editable poly and attach them to eachother so that you are left with one editable poly that has a multisub material on it, then do a weld, then you can manually adjust the road to be level by selecting verteces on each side of the road and either move them or scale them in the Z axis, or use push and pull as youve allready done.

 

So as far as i know there are no easy fixes for roads, but hopefully some of this may help you out.

[Jon Berntsen]

I spent a couple of years troubling with architerra. I don't know about the current version, but a few years ago it was a disaster, at least to the methods I use today. There is a terrain conform script that does the trick pretty good. Keep in mind that there are no easy fix for roads as far as I know neighter, but I mean, when you play Cities: Skyline there is certainly easy to form roads. So why haven't max implemented such a function except from baking something half way around into civil view. I see they want to sell Civil 3d, of course, but "creative users" like us don't use civil 3d in our pipeline.

 

Back to the terrain conform. This is what you are looking for.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/terrain-conformer

 

I make a spline with glue, and then use the spline geometry with correct road witdh. THen I adjust the terrain to be somewhere around the right height according to provided sections, and then I use terrain conform with that spline road. Before you use terrain conformer: You need to keep depth to 0 on the spline geometry, and then convert it to poly.

 

Of course you made a copy of the glued spline before you made geometry from it. I then use this spline with railclone. Even with this procedure, the road isn't going perfectly along with the terrain, so if you're up for some close-ups, you'll need to work more on those parts.

Road intersections needs to be done manually.

 

I saw a chinese plugin the other week, which allegedly could do this quite good, but according to the comments, it was shit because nobody understood chinese. Lol.

 

Make yourself a workflow on roads, then use it on every project. If you constantly search for new ways to make better roads, you would soon spend more time on searching than it would take to perfectly model the conformed terrain to the road.

 

After 10 years in this business, roads are the ones that is giving me most headache.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Yes, doing street on none even terrain should be already resolved by Autodesk you may thing but. No still a pain in the neck.

Script I have use that help is http://75ive.com/ant-stitcher/

Laso some one talked very good about this other one.

http://rendering.ru/ru_en/plugins/splineland.html

At the end you always have to spend some time adjusting and making it look good.

[Jose Negrete]

Here's a link to the other plugin Jon mentioned called terrain axe: http://www.flyingcfx.com/

I thought about trying it out but haven't. I also use the ant stitcher and glue.

 

This crossroad feature looks cool:

http://www.flyingcfx.com/enjoy/?p=700

 

I think the smooth road tool would be of use to you:

http://www.flyingcfx.com/enjoy/?page_id=7

 

Looking through the features again is making me want to try it out - though, the price point has kept me away.

Edited May 23, 2016 by acad-gatsu
added links