Making Rocks

[MattG]

I am trying to make a scenic piece, think like a stair case built into some outdoor rock looking things. I attached a picture that is kinds like it, however I am thinking that this is actually going to be simplier. It is going to be where the actual constructed pieces is a wooden frame with wire mesh over it and plaster over it. That means it will be more like one bit rock ungulation thing.

Has anyone come across any good ways to do something kind of like this in vectorworks?

Matt

[michaelk]

Matt

I've had acceptable results w/ this workflow:

Make a variety of rock-sized and vaguely rock-shaped "piles" of 3D solids.

Use the drape surface to create a surface. Play around w/ the number of points when creating the surface. Flip the piles around to get surfaces from various sides.

Flip the orientation of a surface and it's duplicate or combine several draped surfaces together.

Stitch and Trim the draped surfaces.

Sometimes you get a weird "seam" in the rock. But it does produce irregularly shaped fairly realistic looking rocks.

Last time I had to do this I was able to find some 3D rocks and use some of those to create the drape surface. The problem w/ the 3D rocks I found was that they were made of thousands of 3D mesh objects and slowed VW to a crawl. The stitch and trim method produces a generic solid, which makes VW much happier.

good luck

michaelk

[Horst M.]

Hallo

There is a File with Rock Symbols in the VW2010 Landmark Library.

When I read your Post, I remembered, that I once upon a time found a kind of plugin that creates Rock objects as dxf Files.

It's still there!

http://www.laffeycomputer.com/macrock.html

And it is a perfect App for this time of the year, because you have to search a bit to find the egg. :-)

It Runs on PPC Macs and I've tested now with OSX 10.5.8 under Rosetta.

have fun

Edited April 2, 2010 by Horst M.

[Ray Libby]

Cool! I remember using the PC version of this a few years ago. It really works quite well, but if I remember correctly the files got pretty unwieldy and render times were long.

[michaelk]

Horst

Looks cool.

But my first test generated a sphere :-(

Really wish I'd known about the rocks in the library!!!!!

[Horst M.]

Ray,

As the created objects are a pile of 3d polygons may be the solution to get better render times is that stitch-trim thing as michealk states in his post.

[michaelk]

In my last rock adventure, I had to give up trying to stitch and trim existing 3D objects. It seems to only take a small hole in the mesh to make the stitch and trim command fail. Draping the found 3D rocks was more predictable.

I'd love to hear someone else's success story.

[MattG]

I got some pretty good results using the drape surface approach over some 3d geometry.

Now I added stairs in it. I drew a path for my stairs and extruded it and subtracted from the draped surface. Looks how I want it except the drape surface is floats and doesn't touch the ground. What can I do to just extend the edge to the ground?

Matt

[michaelk]

Double click the drape surface - this will activate the 3D reshape tool.

You can move the vertices one at a time or a whole U or V line of vertices.

hth

michaelk

[michaelk]

... or Shift-Click on a bunch of vertices and drag them down.