Siteplan Workflows

[Thomas Thomassen]

I'm looking into VW as an option to model site terrains.

The parametric terrain in VW looks promising. Being able to go back and forth, quickly editing terrain changes is a process that I sorely miss in my toolkit at the office.

Having looked at VW for some days now I have some questions.

How do you model site terrains where you have roads illustrated?

The road tools are not fit for the job as I never have a simple road without branches.

I thought of creating a pad out of the road profile, but this is Norway - not a single flat area, the terrain is all over the place, so I can't create just one planar road.

I also tried to Project the road profiles onto the terrain, but I ran out of memory. When I looked at Task Manager VW's memory usage when to to nearly 4GB and would then crash with "Out of memory message."

I tried to cut the roads down into smaller pieces but I'd still get the same error.

And then here is the issue that I won't have a smart terrain after I try to intersect it.

So after dabbling around myself for a while now I'm very interested in hearing what existing users do.

(Sorry, just noticed the workflow section of the forum. Maybe a mod can move this topic?)

Edited June 9, 2010 by Thomas Thomassen

[stmlandplan]

Greetings Thomas. It would help to know what you need as an end product. If you are needing to model roadways interactively there are tools in VW to do it that I have not mastered yet. I'll be interested in hearing what others have to say on this aspect.

If however you need a visual representation for presentation and study then creating a DTM in VW and using texture beds to represent roadways, curb & Gutter, hardscapes, etc. is quite effective and offers a lot of control. You would send these texture beds to the surface of your model and you can get as intricate as you'd like. It takes a little practice but the control is there once you learn how to use it all. Most of my work is done in conjunction with and preceeding our Civil Engineers' work. Translations to DWG formats are no problem. I'll try to attach a simple model that I am working on to show you an example but I've seen a lot of users take the detail to far greater detail. This project was for quick study and communication of the vision with others.

I hope this is of some help.

[Bob Holtzmann]

One of the cardinal rules I've followed when working with DTMs in Vw:

The DTM is generally based on 3D polys, arranged as a 3D contour map, usually generated from a source survey of 2D polylines. The source polylines MUST have as few vertices as possible. They can be simplified with the Purge Polys command from Vectorbits, or manually delete vertices from the Object Info Palette.

The simplified polys generally reduce the time to update changes to the Site Model (via roads and pavers used as site modifiers), and eliminate possible memory overload (probably from the Undo cache).