Realistic Hillshade
-
Hello everyone, my name is Jeff and I am new to the forums.
My question is about shadows.
I have a this terrain model:
skp file
I would like to know if there is a way to make the shadows look less "blocky" and a litle more realistic.
The only idea i have right now is to make the cells that form that terrain smaller, but I would rather evade creating more poly.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for reading! -
It looks like you've used Hide to hide the edges between faces. If you'd used Soften/Smooth, instead, the shadows wouldn't have quite the blocky look you are showing.
A quickie example.
Two identical bits of geometry. On the right the edges between faces are hidden. On the left, softened.
-
Actually i did smooth it.
I tried to smooth it some more:
but the results are still very blocky
-
Post the SKP file.
-
How the heck did you draw that and why did you do it that way? Effectively your model is made up of a gazillion square-section tubes that have been pulled up and cut off with the terrain. There are vertical faces extending downward from the edges between surfaces. These vertical faces are being displayed where they meet the terrain surface. Despite the fact that you tried to soften them, those edges didn't get softened because of the vertical faces joining them.
Take a look at the image and the model I've uploaded. See if it looks better. I deleted all those vertical faces and then softened the edges on the terrain surface. I also fixed the reverse faces and purged about 8 Mb of unused junk from your model.
Before I cleaned it up:
-
Kind of cool but never seen it done like that.
-
Thank you very much Dave for all the help!
@dave r said:
How the heck did you draw that and why did you do it that way?
ha ha, the reason for this weird model is that this is an import of a specific ArcScence model.
(I have to work with this import because it contains information that would be to much time consuming to recreate in sketchup)
I'm guessing that the "extrude" function of ArcScence (kinda like the push pull in sketchup) creates this sort of phenomenon. Or maybe it is the export import process... anyway, thanks again for the help! -
I understand. So if you have to use that model in SketchUp, it seems you can have soft edges on the terrain or you can keep the vertical faces but you get to decide. Fortunately deleting the unneeded geometry is a simple two step process in SU.
Advertisement