How To Make Topography In 3ds Max

[Beverly Zielonko]

Iwant to create a mesh/surface from contours that I imported from CAD with Z-values. I wonder what the quickest way is to create a surface from these contours? I prefer not having to use Grasshopper due to time constraints of learning a new program.

You can run _Patch instead of MeshPatch on the points - that will give you a surface instead of a mesh. However, it will not go through all the points as the MeshPatch does, depending on how many spans and what stiffness you give it will determine how much it conforms. A lot of spans and low stiffness will conform better to the points, but will also make the surface heavier, noisier and harder to edit globally (but better to edit locally).

The points below the rest maybe is the problem. Maybe there were caused because I was deleting a lot of points outside the area. Which I did because the trim/split tool would not split/trim the contours, maybe they were too complex.

Well, after having fixed the point problem, you can run Patch playing with fewer spans and varying the stiffness until you get a terrain result smooth enough yet close enough to the original that is acceptable to you. Then Rebuild the patch with many more spans - which will allow you to edit it more locally. Again, some experimentation will be necessary.

Thanks bud!

Here is the result of the ditch from MeshPatch only. I wonder if it is possible to just create a surface based on MeshPatch, and then edit that one? It seems both Drape and Patch works with square grid pattern, which perhaps is bound to be less exact.

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Patch is more exact with lower U and V values, but still is floating in the ditch. It seems like it takes more computing power to run it. Maybe because it is a bit more exact. Patch also creates random hills around the ditch. Not a huge problem though.

I got one final question about how to create new elevations in the Draped square grid. In this video the guy uses RebuildSurface and then PointsOn, which enables him to see the points in each intersection in the square grid. When I try to do that for the Draped square grid, nothing happens. I am wondering if I still need to create some kind of surface to be able to do that?

One other approach is to make a surface which best corresponds to the largest part of the mesh, and then instead of trying to point edit the smaller detail areas where there are not enough points, trim those areas out, make new smaller local surfaces that conform better, then adjust/join those to the original. This will of course then end up as a patchwork kind of affair and it will be a polysurface - one that you cannot point-edit as you can a single surface.

I have a site survey that show elevation points, rather than contours. Is there a way to create a ground surface with these points? The end result desired is just a smooth surface that changes grade with these points, such as the gentle slope from a lane to the house. I've input a PDF of the survey into my VW drawing and now can't figure out how to input the elevation points into something that VW can convert into a ground surface. Any tips would be appreciated.

Thank you. I think that worked. What should be done about the landscape where the house sits? Would I need to somehow create a void or excavate where the basement sits in the landscape? Is there a way to easily carve these voids out of the topography? Thanks in advance.

Hi, Have your surveyor provide you with a .csv file. this data is the rl and eastings and northings from their survey data. They may need to change the file extension to .xyz or zip it up as the computer doesn't like to send program files.

I created my contours but I can't see my original survey under the contours. I would like the contours to show over the Survey with the elevation stakes showing as well. I have tried different visability settings but can't seem to get it to show the way I want. Does anybody have and suggestions?

You can make the Site Model transparent in Top/Plan in order to see objects underneath. Setting the fill to none in the Attributes Palette is one way to do this but will render the Site Model transparent in section viewports so a better way is to disable 'Draw Site Border' in the 2D Display settings.

I love topography. It is dynamic, complex. High mountains drop down into plains split by gulleys before crumpling into hills. It flows and morphs. No two points are exactly the same. Most fantasy maps do not show realistic terrain, but instead use abstractions like stamps to add features to a map.

Stamps give a wonderful old-fashioned artistic flair to a map, and they show different types of terrain in a clear, easy to read way. However, real terrain does not look like this. So what if we want to give our fantasy maps the look of real topography? Well it is complicated, because a stamp can be as easy as drawing in a triangle for a mountain, but you cannot do that for realistic topography.

Nor, is it easier to draw a realistic relief by hand, as is often done for real landscapes. We have elevation data for earth. That source already exists, but for a fantasy map there is nothing except what you provide with your own imagination. Drawing relief like the above without having a existing reference would be nightmarish, to say nothing of the actual time involved. One solution to making realistic topography for a fantasy map is making elevation data first, and letting the computer handle the rest.

The first step is downloading this data. I grabbed some elevation data from GMTED (you can get it here). Does not have to be of a particular place, the goal is to get a lot of stuff to work with and pare it down later. I got a tile from South America around southeastern Brazil, western India, and part of the Sakha Republic in Siberia (Russia). As I have said before, you can make any area unrecognizable, but I also enjoy going for more obscure terrain (if you are from the US or Europe of course) to begin with just to make it as fresh and exciting as possible.

You then want to decide what scale your eventual fantasy map will be at. The same features can look very different at different scales and you want your data to look consistent, just like real terrain would. For my example map, I am aiming for a area about the size of western Europe, so I will be working at 10,000,000km (rounded to make things easier). I am sure there is a better way to do this, but currently I export snippets of each tile as .tif files at that scale through the layout tool in ArcGIS Pro (400 dpi).

This leaves you with what is essentially a bunch of 8bit rasters, which might be a lot less than your original DEM, but you are going to be hacking at them like Frankenstein later on anyways. Ideally I hope to work out how to export at the original bit depth of the DEM, modify in that bit depth, and then make the finished DEM at that same bit depth, but you can still get good results with my current workflow. One trick that works anytime you are worried about coarse data, is to work at a much larger scale than your final image.

What you are doing here is a lot like making a photo mosaic or rearranging puzzle pieces. You are taking existing shapes and moving them around to form something new. Here you are just going to grab whatever interests you, say a mountain range, and slap it somewhere else to make a new landscape. You can smash things together at random, or try and match geologically related landforms in plausible ways. It is entirely up to you. Fantasy landscapes do not have to follow real-world rules after all.

Something to remember here, is that light and dark does not mean just that, it also translates to elevation in your final DEM. So you can use the dodge and burn tools to level a landscape, or create mountains out of nothing. I also like using the clone stamper and soft brushes (in Photoshop). Generally, my workflow for any particular area is to find something I like, move it with selection tools, and then blend it into surrounding areas.

You also want to decide what sort of landscape you want to end up with. I want to make a island, so it has to have lower areas all around it so I can later generate where the waterline would be. I also want some mountains in it, because mountains are pretty (do we need a better reason)?

Because India is mostly lower elevation than this part of Siberia, blending them together is going to have the effect of making areas lower in elevation. This will help further refine our coastlines. As I move into blending terrain together, I turned the opacity of my clone stamp brush down. It is always better to work slowly, building in layers than smushing together different DEMs at full opacity.

Pro looked at your .tif file and could not figure out where to place it on the map, so it drops it at 0, which in the default Pro projection (Mercator), is a tiny spot just off the shore of Nigeria. This also means we cannot use the project raster tool, because to project a raster you technically need to know what projection it is already in. Instead we define the projection. You are telling Pro what projection the image is in. We are lying to the computer (humanity 1, terminator 0).

I am not going to tell you how to make the map itself. This tutorial is about getting you to the best step 1, and then letting you go free from there. The beauty about going through this workflow, is that you can do anything with your new data that you would do with real terrain. You can run calculations with your DEM (but be careful that you do not over-interpret the results since it does not necessarily follow the rules of real terrain), or even make other datasets based off of it. Just like real spatial data, you can even take your fantasy map online.

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