Jonnie63
Member
Joined: Mar 31, 2019
Post Count: 71
Status:
Offline
|
|
|
Re: Terrains And Landscaping
|
Hi Emmanuel,
Thanks for the leads, I agree with some of the points raised in those leads.
These are the issues I encountered and solutions.
I set myself the target of creating a terrain to more or less completely surround a house, if the land is not completely flat then builders still usually level the area for the house.
I quickly gave up with height maps available online but I will not lengthen this post going into the detail.
I tried various graphics noise filters but they did not "respect" my constraints - for instance a zero height around the boundary of the height map.
In the end it was simplest to use the airbrush and blur tools in my graphics editor and paint it myself. I was careful to arrange for the boundary and central areas to be darkest so that the texture would not flood the house or have open seams around the edge.
To avoid excessive triangle count/ file size I used Meshlab
[specifically quadric edge collapse decimation]
When I imported the terrain into Sweethome, even though I had been taken great care the terrain texture (grass in my case) flooded the house it was at the right level 'by eye' but I guess a small numeric issue meant that the grass was maybe a few millimetre above the floor and although I like nature I am not fond of grass carpet 
The final correction was to go into blender and cut the terrain so that all areas at "ground" zero were cut off, this also gives SweetHome a nice datum plane for import - the imported part now automatically sits neatly on the ground when imported and does not flood the house.
I think if I did this one again I would do the following things differently.
1. I think I would be even harder with the decimate settings in Meshlab - I asked for a 90% reduction in number of triangles but I think I could have been much harder - its only for grass hills !
2. I think it would be easier to make up a terrain from a set of small hill clusters - more flexible.
The process is simple so if anyone shows interest and there are not ready examples out there already then I would be happy to make a collection of terrain furniture that others could use, I think for grass hills it should be possible to have fairly small part sizes so that it does not slow down people's machines.
|
[Apr 18, 2019, 11:57:36 AM]
|
|
[Link]
|
|
