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


Gro Mariann

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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. 

3D-kart.vwx

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DWG Maps often aren't the most precise drawing quality, at least where I live.

 

If you look closer at the Buildings there is often some overlapping geometry

or gaps. Both will cause problems or even prevent from extruding later.

3D Polygons also aren't the most beloved object type for VW.

So it may be worth to fill the houses manually with 2D Polygons in paint bucket

mode. This should prevent from overlapping issues.

But of course fail when there are gaps in building borders.

(You can create a reasonable sized rectangle around your working area

as a border, to prevent VW from trying to fill the whole Plan when in such a

bleeding case)

Edited by zoomer
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@Gro Mariann I have a bit of confusion regarding your post.  Probably my ancient brain. :-)

is this what you want to achieve, note the screenshot below)??

1436111668_ScreenShot2021-02-22at12_53_21PM.thumb.png.9a6b2627fdbdcdbc12cb04de187c24e8.png

 

 

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.

 

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1 hour ago, Kevin K said:

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...

This is exactly what I would do. Don’t forget you need to “update” the site model for the texturebeds to show.

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And I think it is a bit fiddly until you get the Texture Beds to actually show the "Texture".

 

For me it always took some time again to get the correct Assignment of RW Texture ...

by checking and assigning to Class/Material and such things until it appeared ....

 

But I do roads and walkways on DTM also by Texture Beds.

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Well Boh....OF course you do....I pay you to give those thumb's up. :-)

No, but seriously, if you guys have any suggestions, pipe up.  The method I chose was pretty simple and quick, seems to me.  Lots of massing models and some texture bed roads. As we all know....VW offers a few ways to do things.

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I'll send you my bank details!

 

Hmm... well I had a look inside the file this time... and I think the texture bed technique is the go for showing roads etc. For for the houses though, as @Gro Mariann only wanted:

On 2/19/2021 at 1:04 AM, Gro Mariann said:

just plain boxes standing on the terrain would be perfect for now.

 

 

then it might be quicker to just use the extg 3d polys to create simple extrudes? I noticed all the roof edge polys are on their own unique "Kart-Takkant" class which makes it easy to isolate and manipulate them. (Other roof lines such as ridges and valleys are on different classes).

 

So this is my suggestion:

 

Use the select similar tool to select the roof edge 3d polys and duplicate them,

convert to lines,

decompose resultant group,

compose lines,

extrude resultant polys (need to do this one by one so use of a shortcut key to extrude is handy here),

change layer of resultant extrudes to same as site model layer and send to surface.

 

See vid.

 

The massing models do look better tho but not sure they can be made from the existing roof geometry so easy?

 

It would be nice to model the roofs properly as the existing 3d polys outline them very well. I had a quick go at this but it seems you would need to do much more complicated modelling to do this so probably not worth the effort if you just want a quick context model.

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That’s a pretty clever approach.

 

The file actually had all the roof lines for all the houses represented by 3D polys so I’d be interested if someone knew a quick way to use these polys to generate the solid roof forms.

 

If I was better at solids modelling then I think I would probably first create the extrudes as per my earlier post then, using the 3D polys as guides, use the solid modelling tools to pop up the roofs.

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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! 

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@Gro Mariann you certainly can make basic roofs using the 3d poly data in the file,  but there are a LOT of those to contend with. That is the only reason I suggested using Massing Models.

Also....even if you took the time to do that, to really make things a bit more accurate you would need to put doors and windows into each of all the existing houses....under all the implied roofs.

Can I inquire.....what is your end goal relating to all this?  

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Oh.. and the texture bed thing.  You need to make a new class for that, then assign a color or texture to that class.  I will say, depending on the material/ texture you choose the texture bed tool does have an issue orientating the material ON the texture bed sometimes. Also, do be mindful to scale the texture when you create it, so when it is applied it is fairly believable.

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@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! 

2021-02-23.png

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1 hour ago, Tom W. said:

Thanks @line-weight I remember you saying that before + did look at it for here but the existing roof geometry in this file typically looks like this:

1704890796_Screenshot2021-02-23at12_38_24.thumb.png.d55953ef96e8293fb54148c08b1ac281.png

So doesn't readily lend itself to that approach. 

Any other ideas?

Yes I see. I had a look at the file. Doing a "decompose" on the roof polygons gets you a group of connected single-line 3d polygons and you'd think it ought to be simple to convert this into a solid in one command. But I don't know any way of doing that (I'd be grateful to know how, if there is a way).

Best i can think of is to take those lines and re-compose some of them into faces (making sure they are "closed") and then snap to them to draw other faces and then add it all into a solid. But that would be a quite tedious process.

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It's a shame because Massing Model should be precisely the tool for doing this kind of thing, but like @Boh said it can't handle the existing geometry when calculating the roofs. The massing model tool should really give you the option of creating a gable roof from the off because not only would this save the tedium of going round all the hips + converting them to gables manually but presumably it would make the maths easier for VW when generating the roofs + you'd like to think that then it might be able to handle them. @Gro Mariann shouldn't have had to send the geometry off to someone else to do it.

Edited by Tom W.
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1 hour ago, line-weight said:

Yes I see. I had a look at the file. Doing a "decompose" on the roof polygons gets you a group of connected single-line 3d polygons and you'd think it ought to be simple to convert this into a solid in one command. But I don't know any way of doing that (I'd be grateful to know how, if there is a way).

Best i can think of is to take those lines and re-compose some of them into faces (making sure they are "closed") and then snap to them to draw other faces and then add it all into a solid. But that would be a quite tedious process.

 

Well....three steps would get you this pretty quickly:

 

1837683578_ScreenShot2021-02-23at6_01_16AM.thumb.png.56b58ed65c856f281373748b7eb1e765.png

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