Hello,
I'm looking a way to make a mesh from the average of the slices you see on the following image.
What I've done so far is a displacement modifier with a height map extracted from the z-depth channel.
The problem is that, even after blurring it in photoshop, I get all sorts of artifacts and it doesn't look soft enough. The resulting mesh is shown on the second image.
I was thinking maybe a cloth modifier that can fall and take the shape?
Thanks!
(Disregard the difference in color please)
Since you have the contour splines (or if you have a mesh at the moment, can extract them by Create Shape on the border of the mesh), you can use the Terrain Object to make an interpolated terrain out of them. The resulting triangulated mesh might be hard to work with, so collapsing it a using the free Populate Terrain script to make a grid mesh out of it might be a good idea (plus a Relax modifier if there are still some issues).
Thank you all.
What Kris said is exactly what happens when using displacement.
To avoid the problem of rasterized images, I was wondering if there was a better way to do it.
In Rhino you can easily use the lines, plus a cross section or 2 (Nurbs).
With 3ds max, as Swordslayer said, I could use Terrain. But the quality I get doesn't seem to be as good.
Bob, using turbosmooth on the mesh done with displacement is one possible way, but, because it smooths out all the mesh evenly, I do loose some valuable small details (like crests in thin borders, like in a lake). I don't see how you can control the pinch with turbosmooth.
Please see below the comparison between terrain and displacement. I'd choose displacement, but it does have the steps that come with a raster image.
@bob.bernstein wrote:Feeling a bit out of my element on this thread...haven't worked with terrain in 3dsmax, so I really don't know if my suggestion may help you, but controlling the pinch in turbosmooth is pretty straightforward....its just a matter of adding enough geometry that the turbosmooth interpolation is to your liking.
Only the OP's question was how to make the stair effect go away, not emphasise it.
@bob.bernstein wrote:Basically, turbosmooth establishes an interpolated curved surface between two non-coplaner surfaces and uses the distance between edges to determine that curve radius. Making the edges closer together reduces the resultant radius.
In a more down-to-earth terms, turbosmooth adds verts to the middle of each edge, connects them them with a vert inserted at the center of each face and 'relaxes' the original verts. Unless you have a good topology to start with, it's not really all that useful, and in this case, there's no good topology to work with. I still think that remeshing a Terrain object would be the best solution given the input (apart from doing it in a specialized geodetic software).
@bob.bernstein wrote:Pic shows three copies of a stair step like object. Middle version has additional edges between the middle "step" and top "step". Third image is the turbosmoothed result, note the difference between the added "pinch" between the middle and top step, but the smoother result between the middle and bottom step.
With an object like that, it's simple, now try that on extruded curves like in the OP's first post.
@guido77 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I still think that remeshing a Terrain object would be the best solution given the input (apart from doing it in a specialized geodetic software).
How do you do a remeshing?Ideally there would be a much better algorithm that replaces terrain.Surface modifier could be one, but the lines need to be absolutely flawless in order to actually get a mesh. Otherwise the object just disappears:https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMa...Or nurbs... I never used them in Max though. I thought they were deprecated.
Not really flawless, you'd have to build a connections of those lines yourself first, and the connections would be what controls the slope. So you'd have to draw them in a contionuous manner to be able to reset their tangents. That would take a LOT of time, this is not really a good usecase for Surface.
NURBS are okayish for parts where there's only one 'profile', as soon as a hill splits to two 'peaks', you're screwed.
I posted it before, I'd use what Terrain spits out and use Populate:Terrain or Instant meshes so that you get a mesh that you can relax a bit and/or turbosmooth. Of course, if you really want a good terrain approximation, you'd have to use a specialized software, AutoCAD has a slightly better terrain from curves (with a bounding volume) implementation, and then there are specialized geodetic packages...
