Underground Site Work

[andrell.laniewicz]

I'm trying to remove only part of the site image.

I'd like to add it to a different layer that I can turn off while I show work happening underground (shoring, footers, underground parking structure, etc).

So far I have found that I can remove the whole image and drawing on top of the site, even on the same layer, does not let them intersect.

[lucdoucet_msdl · Accepted solution]

The site image can be placed on a layer, but not much else.

You can try this:

1. Switch to the layer menu

2. Create a layer for the site "Site_image"

3. Double click the site image to select it and in the layer menu, set it to "Site_image".

4. Turning the layer "Site_image" on and off, turns the site image display off.

I have not found a way to extract the site image imported from Bing, but you can create your own using Google Maps Pro and the "Save Image" function. I also like the open source windows application SasPlanet.

5. Create a new material with the new site image you'll create using Google Earth or SasPlanet.

6. Assign it to a grouped rectangle with the same proportions as the site image bitmap.

7. Scale the grouped rectangle to match the imported satellite image. You can temporarily set the material to semi-transparency.

8. You can then edit the site image bitmap in Photoshop or Gimp to include a transparency map of the areas you want "empty", save to a PNG and reassign that new version to the site image material.

9. Then set your visibilty parameters to mask the ground plane.

Voila, a hole in the ground (See GoogleEarth_Excavate.png). 🙂

Regards,

Luc

[lucdoucet_msdl]

Alternately, you can map the Satellite image material to an extruded rectangle and boolean intersect an excavation volume. Then paint the interior faces to the excavation material.

You can then reposition the excavation limits as required to align with other objects on the site. You can also duplicate the site group model and boolean cut it with the opposite volume and create a volume of the excavated material on a separate layer.

Luc

[josh.goldstein]

Hi @andrell.laniewicz, 

Images in FormIt are non-standard modeling objects, which results in some limitations - like not being able to split them and delete sections as you're trying to do. 

I think @lucdoucet_msdl's suggestions are the right way to work around this, for now. In the future, we'd like to improve the way images work in FormIt, to bring them more inline with other objects so they can be modified in similar ways. We've added this feedback to our system. Thanks for bringing it up!

[andrell.laniewicz]

That is good to hear. I'm going to be doing a series of webinars on FormIt to get AEC Collection users focused on this solution instead of the 'other' 🙂

[lucdoucet_msdl]

@andrell.laniewicz ,

If you are interested in another application of the material mapping and cutting technique, I've used it to model the terrain from a site plan of which I only had a raster images. The technique is borrowed from the Infraworks method of image overlays.

You can check it out on the Autodesk Gallery here: Cabanon LeCorbusier

There are some drawbacks to this method when you cut to the edge of a solid. Sometimes the mapping orientation and offset is lost and the material becomes mis-aligned. This can also happen if you delete some vertices and try to recreate the solid.

As you mentionned the AEC collection, I've also tried to use Infraworks, Civil3D, Recap for diffferent aspects of conceptual design such as modeling uneven terrain, street and curb profiles and trees. In the Cabanon project, I would overlay screen exports of the point cloud in recap to get relative distances and heights as I the aerial Lidar data was hard to merge and reconcile with the Model Maker site from Infraworks.

Here's a quick image of that overlay:

Mapping materials of CAD drawings in image form is sometimes more practical than modeling from vector imports.

Regards,

Luc