lisagravy Posted April 22, 2021 Share Posted April 22, 2021 I have a site model of around 5km x 4km... within which there is a fair bit of forestry cover. I don't have (and won't have) tree survey information for this entire area... however I have polygon blocks showing the extent of significant areas of forest. I know I could use landscape areas to show a block of planting at set height, but I'm conscious of site area and killing my machine! And I know I could look at extruding these blocks from the surface of the model to a set height to give sharp massing blocks... but I'm looking to create something a bit more stylised, and softer in terms of edge and height. I'd ideally want to show a mass with transparency and texture, and potentially undulating height (say between X and X metres above site model surface) - almost like being able to put a drape or blanket over the trees!! However - I have no idea where to start with this, or if it is at all possible. Has anyone shown forestry successfully graphically in Vectorworks in this type of way? Or does anyone know of a tool I could look into to give this type of visual effect? Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Tony Kostreski Posted April 22, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Popular Post Share Posted April 22, 2021 Hi @lisagravy, Now...I'm not entirely sure this is exactly what you are looking for but taking a stab since I thought this was an interesting question 🙂 I did opt to use landscape area to represent forest massing, not including plants but instead using 3D components. Very simple. 2 Components: Trunks and Vegetation (or Canopy). I applied the "ET Canopy Texture" since it has opacity but you can use any texture. The polygon representing forest is converted to a 'Landscape Area' using my 'Forest Line' LA style. It uses a cloud representation for 2D. This will very quickly get you 3D geometry to match to the surface of terrain (site model). This might be good enough but I explored some more. Landscape areas can be ungrouped which will give you a mesh. This mesh can be converted to a Subdivision allowing us to sculpt it to give it some varying height if this is for visual purposes. Note: you lose the landscape area if you need that for area calculations. Let me know your thoughts on this. Attached is the sample file.Sample Forest.vwx Best, Tony 5 Quote Link to comment
Jeff Prince Posted April 23, 2021 Share Posted April 23, 2021 @lisagravy Depending on how close you want to view these trees, a forest canopy texture with a bump map could really be useful. That's how the GIS and atmospheric perspective folks handle it. Years ago there was this guy that worked for the US National Parks Service that modeled landscapes in Bryce 3D and he had the most amazing tutorial on utilizing displacement mapping for visualizations such as this.. 1 Quote Link to comment
unearthed Posted April 23, 2021 Share Posted April 23, 2021 @lisagravy Do you want to show little, zoomed-in vignettes of parts of the forest? IS this only for presentation, or do you want to break the forest into zones for costings and interventions (Oh, I see you already have some polygons)? Does your jurisdiction have full waveform lidar available? Some areas of NZ now have this and it gives you the canopy and the ground as two separate files. I'm working with this stuff more as some job sites are getting huge, and the data is coming available. Tom's method, basically super-elevating existing surface, and maybe adding some (very widely spaced lumpiness) looks promising. I have in the past got an aerial of rough grassland, converted it to monochrome, and then used software (in that case a sketchup plugin) to treat it as a heightmap (e.g a .dem file), and generate contours off that - that'd enable lumpiness that shouldn't overburden your machine. This is very simple now using tools like QGIS, IDK if VW's latest versions can do anything with .dem files - my agent keeps telling me it's a GIS now. this guy https://smathermather.com/2020/03/23/beyond-data/ does similar work to what Jeff refers to. Here he's talking about single plants under the canopy https://smathermather.com/2010/01/09/modeling-sub-canopy-biophysical-variables-with-povray/ . Software has advanced since then and some of this is less rockjet science than it was in 2009 Quote Link to comment
Popular Post lisagravy Posted April 23, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted April 23, 2021 Thanks for the suggestions guys! At least I have an idea of where I might be able to start now, I'm going to have a bit of an explore on these today / over the weekend to see what best fits... and I'll come back to you with where I end up with!! @Tony Kostreski - thanks so much for checking this out. This looks near enough like what I'm looking to do - particularly the scuptural mesh, and I'd have never got there without your post. At a site this size, it is really just for visual context purposes, but I felt a single defined height wouldn't really give the right context! So being able to sculpt it slightly looks like it could work. Also may have a look at bump maps @jeff prince - I've never used them in Vectorworks, did have a short foray into 3DS max years ago and thought they were great though. Could possibly use a combination! @unearthed It is only for presentation really, though I'd like the positions to be accurate - I have fairly accurate map polygon data, albeit in 2D. I could access LIDAR but there is a pretty steep charge here and it's not something our project will budget unfortunately! It'll be for overall views of the site area, and possibly a couple of vignettes - the project really is about what's happening between the forestry banks - routes, facilities, biking, etc, but it's all set within forestry clearings so it's important to get something that isn't clunky, but also doesn't look just like an extruded block! I'll have a read through the links, it does sound similar to Tony's, though if I can streamline anything by a bit of QGIS work that works for me!! Will let you all know where it goes! 5 Quote Link to comment
lisagravy Posted April 28, 2021 Author Share Posted April 28, 2021 Hmmm I seem to be falling at the first hurdle here, and not sure why! I've set up landscape areas to display 3D components / 3D polygon, and sent these to surface on my site model (though I don't even think I should have to do that?!) and my polygon is still weirdly floating in air away above my site. @Tony Kostreski - I'm assuming I'm missing something insanely obvious, but I can't for the life of me work out what I'm doing wrong here, before I even get to mesh stage!! I've screengrabbed some of my settings below. Quote Link to comment
lisagravy Posted April 28, 2021 Author Share Posted April 28, 2021 @Tony Kostreski I did also try just importing your Forestry Line style and using that... but my landscape areas are still not hugging the terrain weirdly, you can see in the elevations they are projecting out at flat lines from the highest point on the site model that they touch? Quote Link to comment
lisagravy Posted April 28, 2021 Author Share Posted April 28, 2021 Yep, so as @iainlyon pointed out, my obvious mistake is in the 'site model layer' setting - my site model is on a different layer, though is set to accept modifiers from all layers. I didn't realise it defaulted here to <landscape area layer>!! Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee Tony Kostreski Posted April 28, 2021 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted April 28, 2021 3 hours ago, lisagravy said: Yep, so as @iainlyon pointed out, my obvious mistake is in the 'site model layer' setting - my site model is on a different layer, though is set to accept modifiers from all layers. I didn't realise it defaulted here to <landscape area layer>!! Ah yes, I believe this is being addressed to default to the site model design layer if there is only one site model in the file. Quote Link to comment
Jeff Prince Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 (edited) @lisagravy I'm interested in seeing what you come up with! I've been playing around with it a bit today to test some ideas. Something you might consider in your quest... Using your poly boundary for a forest to clip a duplicate of the site model and then texture it. Taking the texture up a notch would be to bump map it. Taking the site model a step further, you could use the site model sculpting tool with the radius set to an appropriate tree diameter with 100% fall off and randomly stipple the surface with different heights. Probably too much work for wide area imagery. Using plant objects is better for close ups anyhow. These are just some quick cartoony examples of the above methods I threw together while experimenting. I think the "build your own texture" method is pretty fun and has a lot of potential. Using brushes with 0% hardness makes smooth gradients that translate well to bump maps. nadar forest canopy image from google with bump generated from the image. Sculpted site model with same texture as earlier, this would be time consuming over large areas. quick texture and bump made in Affinity Photo on ipad with pencil. Edited April 28, 2021 by jeff prince 3 1 Quote Link to comment
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