Creating terrain textures
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Does anybody have experience in large terrain texturing in Sketchup? I am modeling a golf course and I would think that Lumion would be perfect tool for presenting this new golf course and the fairways. I have also tested Unity 3D for creating similar animations. In Unity workflow, I can texture the terrain quite nicely in Unity, but in Lumion workflow I should probably do it in Sketchup.
The area that I have modeled is 1500m x 1500m and I have traced the contours and created the terrain with Sandbox Tools. Then I have used Terrain reshaper to make the terrain less complex. Now I would need to texture the terrain. In sketchup it seems to be difficult to texture the such a big terrain nicely. I am thinking about creating single texture for the whole terrain and projecting that texture into surface. Does anybody have any experience in rendering this kind of big terrain textures in external applications? Does it take ages to render? Or do you think any other good ways to create terrain texture in Sketchup?
Golf course layout with contours:
Terrain in Sketchup (file size about 2mB):
WIP in Unity3D:
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I have no experience with Lumion or Unity3D (but want to
First you need to know how close you'll get to the ground, and then you need to do some calculations.
AFAIK jpg has a limit of 30x30k pixels, which should be 900Mpx x 3(RGB) = 2.7GB file and memory requirements for the texture alone. And even at that resolution every pixel will cover 5x5cm of ground (1500x1500m), which means that at ground level it will look very pixellated. IMO you will get big problems trying to cover that big area with one single bitmap.
A golf course have large areas with grass, sand etc, quite distinctly separated from each others, which makes this very suitable for repeating textures like used in SU.
I don't know if Lumion can use layered textures etc, so that you could get borders between textures softened, like in that Unity-pic? That's the way I think I would've done it in LightWave anyway.
In SU maybe you could apply a smooth grass texture to everything, and then cut out areas that should have a different texture like sand/gravel etc. Select the faces and group them. Edit the group and select all faces except for the outmost ring and group them again. Move/copy upwards 1m (for now).Explode the orignal group and delete the center part/group (optional, but will save yo some polys as it will not be visible anyway). Now you have a copy of that area with one ring of overlap. Lower the group 99cm and set it to not cast shadows. Make a png32 texture with sand/gravel tex for the entire group, where you use the overlap area for blending with alpha channel. You could paint transparency with a grass brush or whatever you like - or just make an alpha gradient like in that Unity pic?
Or just leave the borders hard, with no blending (and no grouping etc)?
It depends on the level of realism you want, and the amount of time you're willing to spend. -
I would also not use a single image for such a large area. Lumion would look very much like that Unity3D screenshot (yes, the different terrain materials blend in nicely with a fall-off in Lumion) but the Lumion terrain is a procedural terrain so no matter how much you zoom in (say to "normal" levels like eye level), it will not fall apart.
Making this in SU should not be an issue. You can even project a smaller version of your image in SU and reload that with a higher resolution one in Lumion. But what Bjorn says about resolution and such, makes sense.
If you wish, I can export it for you to Lumion (although for this, the simple Demo version would be good too) so that you can have a look how it would look.
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Thanks Bjornkn and Gaieus for your comments! Even though you said that using a large terrain texture for texturing the model wouldn't work, I decided to test it. I exported top view of the flat "texture model" of the golf course and projected that into the surface. The resolution of the texture was 1600x1600. As you said, the model doesn't look perfect in Lumion. Although, the textures look a little bit like blended but still they look pixellated.
I am not sure if I understand how to get the blended textures with the workflow that bjornkn is describing. Therefore, I haven't tried it yet. I would like to start by trying to texture the terrain "normally" by projecting the borders of the textures into terrain and painting the surfaces with textures. Anyway, I have not been able to do it so far. Is there any way to project borders into complex surface? How do you cut out the area from the terrain without getting bug splats or freezing Sketchup?
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Interesting thread, will be watching to see if a genius solution is found.
Personally I'd use Vue, it can create the terrain perfectly, I'd either do the complete project including animation with Vue (will take a long time to render) or bake textures to mesh and leave it overnight to bake and export. Then take it into Lumion.
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How much elevation is there in that terrain? I mean height difference along the Z axis
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Csaba, there does not look like much, I'd estimate max 30ft.
Can you share the .skp? and I'll see what I can do as far as a single texture goes, or maybe some procedural ones.
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You can export the skp file to Lumion as well and paint on top - however true that first draping the contour lines would be best as then you can paint the parts separately (and more precisely than just eye balling).
I am curious however what a Vue round trip can achieve, too. In the near future I will have to deal with rather large terrains, too.
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@unknownuser said:
You can export the skp file to Lumion as well and paint on top
Really?, I did not think this was possible, is this in the new upgrade 2? (just released one)
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@gaieus said:
How much elevation is there in that terrain? I mean height difference along the Z axis
The biggest height difference is 30 meters in this model.
Here is the terrain file and also texturemap file. I also have a file with only contours traced with elevation if you think that there is some better way to create a terrain. In this case I used Sandbox tools and Terrain reshaper plugin.
Solo, when you mentioned baking textures to mesh, did you talk about Vue or some other software?
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Here's a very quick proof_of_concept that shows that it works, sort of. For some strange reason SU refuses to cast a shadow on the fill-in with gravel and soft edges, while it works fine in Twilight. It looks like Twilight is just sing the alpha as a clipmap, and does not use the greylevels in the alpha?
As said before, the ring is where the 2 parts overlap, and where the alpha channel is not white. The grass is a repeating texture (not really suitable for this due to the very visible repeat pattern), and the gravel with edges is one single texture, exported from SU and edited in PS where alpha was painted on a selection mask around the border, and the border area (which was originally filled with the grass) was then cloned with the gravel texture allover and reapplied in SU. One could spend some more time, add some shadows or whatever, or some other details?
Anyway, it works - sort of. It would probably be quicker and easier using some UV tools?
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@solo said:
@unknownuser said:
You can export the skp file to Lumion as well and paint on top
Really?, I did not think this was possible, is this in the new upgrade 2? (just released one)
Yep, see here: http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=1085.0
(sorry guys, registered members only...)
This is not in update 2 (which is just going to be released soon) but in the current version already.
Can you remember your old signature here?
"The average user never reads user guides and tutorials, that’s why they are only average"
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bjornkn, that looks really nice blending of textures.
Gaieus, is possible to paint on top of all the textures or is there some limitations?
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@miikka1978 said:
Gaieus, is possible to paint on top of all the textures or is there some limitations?
Sorry but what do you mean by "paint on top of all the textures" (and in which program in this cae)?
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@gaieus said:
@miikka1978 said:
Gaieus, is possible to paint on top of all the textures or is there some limitations?
Sorry but what do you mean by "paint on top of all the textures" (and in which program in this cae)?
Sorry for being unclear with the question. I was talking about Lumion 3D and referring to your comment when you said that in Lumion you can paint on top of Sketchup model.
For example if I have 4 textures in a model that has been exported from Sketchup (like the golf course model in earlier replies/pictures), will I be able to paint on top of all of these textures/materials? In Lumion tutorials, they say that you have to turn a material into landscape material in order to paint on top of it. Anyway, I may have misunderstood this. Also, it seems that material needs to one of those premade landscape materials if you want to paint on top of it. Therefore, I understood that you should not be able to paint on top of "custom" materials (textures created in Sketchup).
Tutorial 4: Materials:
http://lumion3d.com/tutorials -
I'd given this quite some thought as well and the biggest problem is that SketchUp doesn't have layered materials. Meaning that a polygon can only have one material. So I though, what if we had the possibility to store a layered material as an attribute and the blending was done with a greyscale image. The actual "baking" of the texture/material would probably mean that every polygon got it's own material though.
Maybe some openGL hack is a better way to blend between materials?
I think it's time to call in the Ruby super heroes again...I would do this (edge blending) in another app like Unity for now until a SU solution exists.
As for using huge textures in real time apps, it's not such a good idea if you want to distribute it to people that doesn't have super graphics cards with huge amounts of memory.
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@gaieus said:
Yep, see here: http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=1085.0
(sorry guys, registered members only...)
Bummer
@gaieus said:
This is not in update 2 (which is just going to be released soon)
Is this version 2 or version 1.2? The reason I ask is that I can't afford to commit $1000 and then have Version 2 come out and have to pay another $350 to upgrade.
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Miikka: I have a pending feature request to Lumion and I even brought this topic as a good example.
So the case now is that once you bring your textured terrain into Lumion, you can swap any material assigned to the surfaces into Lumion landscape material. However as it is currently programmed, there is always one default landscape material in a landscape "theme" (say a green grass) and three others that you can paint on this default material.
So all in all, when you select a SU material in Lumion and assign the Lumion landscape material to it, it will assign this default material only. If you go to your next SU material, it will also assign this so what you cannot do now is that you selectively assign the four, possible landscape materials in Lumion.
Too bad, I also realise, as we can obviously "plan" with much more accuracy in SU then in Lumion.
@bob james said:
Bummer
Well, as it was my own series of images as "tutorial" there, here they are...
But as said, if I wanted to paint that draped road with another landscape material, I could not, as Lumion would assign that same green grass to it as well. Currently. Many of the feature requests regard these areas now so hopefully there will be considerable development here.@bob james said:
Is this version 2 or version 1.2? The reason I ask is that I can't afford to commit $1000 and then have Version 2 come out and have to pay another $350 to upgrade.
No, this is just an incremental release. In the video here (about silhouette people) they call it "service pack 2". As far as I remember, they are planning to release major versions yearly or so. This would mean that around next December.
This coming "update" or "SP" 2 will be released soon. They say that if they do not find some serious, new bugs in the new features, still this month but early June the latest. So if you hesitate, wait what comes next. Maybe some more "sneak previews" would indeed be good.
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I still maintain that Vue will be the best solution for this type of project.
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Huh, Pete your Vue render looks so real! I actually bought Vue when it was on sale about 5-6 months ago. 3D modeling/rendering is just a hobby for me and I haven't had enough time to really learn to use Vue. My goal is to be able to render decent 3D animation for the golf club and hopefully the club would agree to pay my Lumion 3D license as a payment. So, I am still trying to figure out if am able to achieve "good enough" level with Lumion and my 3D skils.
This is more the level I am hoping to achieve. This is one of the newest golf courses in Finland and they created 3D model for promoting the golf club.
http://www.3drender.fi/public/tapiola_golf/Virtualgolfer/
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