Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 Ok well I've got a question about making acurate ground elevations. I think that's the word I'm looking for anyway. I'm currently working on a golf clubhouse for a new golf course. I have a full topigraphical site plan. What's the best way to get that topographical plan into 3d so all the hills and dips will be there. I'm pretty sure my boss (who's a part owner of the course) would be ecstatic if I could acuratly model the entire course. I was sorta thinking about converting the drawing into a raster image and then filling the areas of different elevations with different shades of grey and then bluring it a lot and using that image for displacement. It feels like it'll be kinda slopy though and probably more time consuming then necessary. I'm working in Max 4. The drawings are autocad. Thanks in advance for your help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victor Erthal Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 You can draw nurbs splines and then use u-loft command to create a surface form one to another. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Ok that sounds like it might work. Haven't used nurbs before but I have the reference manuals. Will I be able to import the topigraphical cad file and then just move the lines up to the elevations where they belong? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 another method is to use surface tools Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Ok surface tools I definitly know how to use. It's one of my favourite modeling tools next to box modeling. Was just talking to the draftsman about it. He's gonna check later and see if the lines have already been assigned elevations in the cadd drawing. Would be really handy if they have. [ October 01, 2003, 07:55 AM: Message edited by: Mad Matt ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victor Erthal Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 Hey Strat! I have completely forguet about that, really it coud be much more simple. Well you can bring you cad dwg and move the sub objects to the right elevation but... you have to redraw with nurbs all the level curves. I dont know if its me, but when i converted the dwg to nurbs, it all went wrong, very wrong. The surface modifier coud work better, but you have to draw a line linking every vertex like a grid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 I guess a loft might work too but I'm thinking I remember that you can't put things onto the path that have more then one piece. Hmm maybe multiple lofts start with a base and do one for each hill. BTW I'm talking about taking the shapes from the topicagraphical and putting them onto the path of a loft at the appropriate elevations. Redrawing all the lines into nurbs just isn't an option. This is probably gonna need to be able to be acomplished in about a day. The drawing is VERY complex. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 last time i made a golf course i used the displacement method. not hyper accurate, but extremely fast, easy and effective to use. here is a quicky still (done about 3 years ago) - Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Don't suppose you've still got your displacement map for that. I'd like to just see what it looked like. Seems to have worked pretty well though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 hold on...i'll dig it out..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 here you go. awfully simple. only a slight displacement was needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Ok thanks. The site I'm thinking about will be a LOT more complicated then that. I'm hoping to model the entire course and hopefully be able to take a 3d tour of it. None of the site work has been done yet so being able to show off the course early could work pretty good for promotional purposes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 I must be missing something here. I do a lot of this kind of work and I always use the terrain compound object. It has worked like a charm ever since someone on this forum gave me the tip of using normalize splines prior to the terrain tool to control the mesh density. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 Originally posted by Brian Cassil: I must be missing something here.....Brian, ur not missing anything. As you pointed out, there are numerous ways to create terrain, i've just mentioned a couple of fast ways, altho as i said, displacement mapping isn't very accurate. i also use acad's surfacing tools allot of the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Brian nope you're not missing anything I am. Didn't know about that object type. Did a simple rough test and it seems to work great. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted October 1, 2003 Share Posted October 1, 2003 That's great to hear! It seems like the obvious solution to me so I was just wondering why noone had suggested that. Nurbs and everything are great but IMHO that's overkill for terrain. BTW I've used Strat's idea in the past for doing background and surrounding hills that I don't need to control very precisely. Works wonderfully in those situations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mad Matt Posted October 1, 2003 Author Share Posted October 1, 2003 Ok well the terrain subobject thing worked pretty good. Thanks guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Svante Bergman Posted November 20, 2003 Share Posted November 20, 2003 EasySite is an affordable and quite useful add-on to autocad. Has all the tools you need to model your site with surfaces. http://www.cadeasy.com/software_information.asp?detail_id=44 /Svante Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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