Terrain best practices

tspco

I have been using TopoShaper for a while, and I am finding there are somethings you just can't do, and things that don't work "just right" This is not an issue with toposhaper, but with other terrain manipulation tools, and procedures. Because of certain things you have to find a "vertex" when using the resident add detail tool within the Sandbox tools, and for some things that is not possible, on the other hand the smoove tool falls short doing other things. When I place a model on a geolocated generated terrain, well of course for the most part you might be able to find something "flat enough", but that is rare. I have used the stamp tool with fair success, but in most cases you end up with a raised, or lowered portion of terrain you just can't tweak enough to make look good, or your model is above or below the terrain. Sometimes I can make it "good enough" but I am a somewhat picky individual, that likes things a tad better than "good enoogh".

Any advice that anyone has to offer will be appereciated.

jeff hammond

i haven't tried this one myself (and very rarely do any sort of terrain manipulation) but it might be worth looking at?

CutNFill by TIG:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=55250

it's a premium plugin but you do get a chance to try before you buy.

pbacot

Vertex Tools, Artisan, InstantRoad, and InstantTerrain offer more tools to work with. There are so many situations, each with it's problems. I've never found the stamp tool useful, but it could be I never tried hard enough. To me it seems an unrealistic way to work terrain around buildings.

For a building I would just place it into the terrain at the proper height. Then change the slopes around it as needed. Instant terrain solves some of this for you.

unearthed

Instant site grader is your friend instantSiteGrader.brk055.JPG the grey band around the house is SiteGrader's work and blends nicely with the Google patch. Pro version (US15.00) is well worth it as you can vary the skirt width more than the free version.

I've tried Cutnfill and it's amazing (will buy hopefully this week), a real time-saver and produces nice red (fill) and green (cut) color-coded solids from surprisingly complex (i.e. real jobs) terrain.

erikB

seems to me this 'siteGrader' is the same function as the stamp function within sandbox (standard plugin)
erikB

unearthed

It differs in that you first predefine a line around your object for site grader to adjust the terrain to (oh and the line doesn't have to be on the same plane), and then you set/adjust the grader width; in the image above I tried several widths until I was happy with 4metres.

The stamp tool by comparison (while it has it's uses) is a very blunt instrument.