Brian Cassil

This is a problem I have faced several times in working with complex terrain objects. See for yourself:




Here's what happens:

I create the existing terrain by using contours and the terrain compound object control. Then cutout the roads, walks, curbs, etc. by extruding plan shapes and creating boolean intersections with copies of the orignial terrain. Then I edit the mesh objects using soft selection, view align, and the move transform to flatten building areas and create ramps etc. All will be going well when at some point I open my file and it looks like the above image. WHY!!! What did I do wrong, and why would it do this midstream. Is there something about using soft-selection on mesh-objects that were created with booleans that makes them unstable. Do I need to convert booleans to editable meshes rather than add the edit mesh modifier.

Okay I realize I'm rambling so any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't expect you to tell me how to recover my uncorrupted terrain, that would be too much to hope for. But If someone has a clue as to how to avoid this problem I would sure appreciate it being passed along.

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Jim Kessler

2 comments:

1st, DON'T use max native booleans, they are terrible. If you do make sure to convert the boolean to a mesh after completing each boolean. If you want to use booleans I strongly suggest getting npower's boolean plugin, works like a charm and doesn't corrupt your mesh and you can stack booleans without issue.

2nd, It looks like you have flipped normals on your mesh. Add a normal modifier to you site and unify the normals. Then add a smooth modifier. You will probably have to edit the smoothing groups manually to get everything right.

Hope this helps...

Brian Cassil

No flipped normals here. The hole you see in the middle is where a structure goes, and the really wierd black spots are created from the mesh vertices being thrown about so.

I'll take your advice on converting max booleans to editable meshes immediatly. Also, I've used power-booleans in the past (the demo actually) and you're right, works like a charm, however it seems to me that this really should work in max. I mean, this has been an issue with max since release 1 and the developers seem to do nothing about it!

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sandpiper

I agree with Jim Kessler on this one. Don't use native max booleans, and in fact, don't use them at all on terrain modeling (my opinion). I've found a different method that works great. I make the terrain just as you mentioned, with contours and the terrain tool. Then take your terrain geometry and hit the ShapeMerge tool under the compound objects pulldown. Pick your plan shape to apply it to the terrain, drop it to an editable poly or mesh and pick the polygon level and it should automatically choose the area that you just cut. If it doesn't, just pick the faces you want. Then you have two options: 1) Detach that selection and extrude it however high you want to. OR 2) Don't detach the selection, but instead assign it a material ID and apply a material to it with that same ID and also apply the UVW map accordingly (hopefully I'm not insulting your intelligence if you already know this stuff). I would suggest making different shapes to use instead of one big one. So for instance if making a parking lot or something, make a shape for the general curb line, then another for the medians, etc...you'll have less problems that way. Also, you mentioned that you like to flatten the terrain for the buildings footprint, so to do that just take those vertices and flatten them with the meshtools plugin that you can get on the web somewhere (I can't remember-but it's free!). I hope I've helped you a little and let us know what you decide to do!

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Brian Cassil

Thanks for the detailed reply, I'll try using shape-merge although I've never had much success with it in the past. I definetly will need to detatch the shapes from each other as there are lots of mesh editing I need to do on the individual elements.

Now, I'm not familiar the "Mesh-Tools" I've heard that thrown around a little but I have no actual experience with it. Can you give me a little more info on where it can be downloaded for?

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Sergio

Hi Brian,

there are two possible things, I found while "booleaning", when you finish modeling,UVW, apply material, tick (in your material) 2-sided, and maybee, faceted, those should help.

Regards Sergio!

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rookie

Well there was a lot of good answers,but here's a trick:
If you want to use the native Max booleans, extrude your shapes higher than the terrain,I mean it should cut the terrain in the middle.
This way your terrain won't look like this.

Brian Cassil

actually, I did exactly that (extrude my shapes through the entire terrain for cutting), in fact the terrain was completely intact and "perfect" for several days. The part I don't understand is why it would become corrupt like this all of a sudden like?

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Gnarly Cranium

I don't have any clue why it would do that either. I've had that sort of random-corruption problem a few times in several totally unrelated situations.... in general, Terrain seems to be much less useful than it ought to be.

As for Meshtools... it is HANDY. It doesn't work with Editable Meshes, you'll want to convert them to Editable Poly-- but that has better modeling commands in the first place anyway. Only thing it's missing is Extrude Edge. Invisible edges go away, you can delete edges without losing faces, and Meshtools on top of that is leaps and bounds more useful than anything Editable Mesh by itself will do. There's commands like Select Edgeloop and Convert Selection to Polygons and so forth. Go get it!

Brian Cassil

Thank you for confirming that I am not crazy! I hope that by changing these to editable poly's that that would cure the problem. And thank you for posting the link as well.

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