[How to use 3D-polygons to draw roads and houses?]

@Boh Thank you, this is a good and quick way to display the houses with the correct outline!  

As I suspected it will be complicated to create houses like the ones in the picture attached in vectorworks, that will have to be for smaller projects when thre is just one or two buildings that need creating. 

 

Will work more on this for upcoming projects. For now I got the houses, fences and hedges from a company specialising in creating 3D-models from map-data, and it wasn't to expensive, so for now that might be the solution over spending many hours doing it myself. Then I can rather focus my time on the sitedesign. 

 

Thank you for all the input! 

[How to use 3D-polygons to draw roads and houses?]

13 hours ago, Kevin K said:

This is a pared down version of the file you posted. I just messed with a few items.

1) a good way to fulfill your desire to show some VERY generic structures on the sight is to use the 'Massing Model' tool.  Very quick way to sort of 'fake populate' the neighborhood. 🙂

You can see I created a few different houses.  Then you can use the 'send to surface' command and it takes all those massing models and places them

directly on the surface of the site model. Works great.

 

2) This may be somewhat confusing......The roads you see in the screenshot are called 'texture beds' site modifiers. Very simple to create those.

I made a copy of your 3d polygons and converted them to regular polys then made one polygon object by

connecting all the appropriate  polygons for the roads, from your file. You can give the roads any texture you wish.

Then....you use the 'create objects from shapes' and choose 'site modifier'. then tell it to be a texture bed.  Nice things about those is that they lay perfectly on the site model surface...

Again, I could have this all wrong as to what exactly you wish to end up with. I gleaned that you wanted to do all this in 3d.  But perhaps you were just wanting 2d.

 

Yes, you understood! I do want a very basic 3-d to show how surroundings are affected by the planned project. Thank you for your input. I did end up creating massing models, I just wished there was a way to make them easily look more like the actual houses, given we have the roof lines in the correct elevation. I used to work in Civil3D before, and had a plug in that created houses in files like this "by magic" - just by the press of a button when creating the sitemodel 😉, I was kinda hoping for a magic button in vectorworks as well. 

 

And I tried the texture beds, they seem to be the easy answer on the roads. I am totally confused. I need to go back to basics to understand how to get the texture to actually show. But I will get there! 

[How to use 3D-polygons to draw roads and houses?]

Thank you for the input and good  resource links!

No easy way to just use the 3D polygons as is, then. 

[How to use 3D-polygons to draw roads and houses?]

I have set up a site model from a map recieved in dwg-format. The map contains all exisiting roads as 3D-polylines or polygons (not closed). I have utilised these together with the contours to get a basic site model. I now want to add detail by giving the roads a different texture/color and adding exisiting houses,  but can't find the easiest way to do this? Seems if I try to create a road from any of the lines it will be placed at z=0. Is there a way to combine these 3D-polys to represent the edge of the road? Or do I have to trace them, create a road with height zero and then lift to surface? 

 

The map also contains surrounding houses, shown with their roof-lines. Is there an easy way to create the houses from these roof lines? I don't need any detail on these, just plain boxes standing on the terrain would be perfect for now.  Is there a way to extrude from the roof lines? 

 

Any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Most of my maps are recieved in this format, so some help getting a good workflow on this would help me a lot on future projects. Hope you understand my english, it is not my native language. 

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