I’m trying to paint a large aerial photo onto a terrain model. 2km road we’re working on. I found the Large Image Splitter extension but now I’m stuck trying to paste 100 or so tiles of the aerial photo onto the 3D terrain model.
I’ve been doing this with single, un-tiled, images for a while now, so good at doing that. But now that there are so many images, that make up the whole image, and they’re smaller than the face I’m painting them onto, I just get one of the tiles repeated over the terrain surface.
Thanks in advance to all you who love helping.
I’m a little confused by your process. You say “pasting”. Are you projecting the image texture down onto your terrain? Have you set the texture to be projected. If the image texture is in multiple faces, have you combined textures to create a single texture?
Can you include your .skp file so we can see what you are working with?
thanks EF
As it’s such a large image, 2km long, I have split the image into blocks. Otherwise the image isn’t clear enough. I used Eneroth’s Large Image Splitter extension. 1st time using it.
I have done the image projection onto surface numerous times before, so I set the texture to Projected, etc. It’s just that I’m used to pasting a single image onto a 3D surface that has the same plan dimension.
This is my first attempt at and image so large. Some of the info i’ve been able to find is that splitting the image up is how you can keep the image quality. As the 2km long image is pretty grainy in SU.
Anyway, model in link below. It’s a biggy, 68MB.
Need permission to download file
The short answer is that there is not a way (that I know of) to automate this process. The trade off here is whether to use one big image at a lower resolution vs multiple higher resolution images - that would need to be ‘draped’ first onto the terrain surface so as to create a boundary for the texture to sit within. Then the projected image can be sampled and pasted. Is 100 textures necessary for good resolution? Could they be combined into fewer…while still balancing the need to preserve higher resolution?
Theres no public access to the file. Maybe it would be possible to create a texture out of the image, a huge one, and apply it to the model.
thanks Francis
should be accessible now
Thanks Eric
that’s what I was thinking too. It’s just that my game is Infrastructure Estimating, and we often have to deal with large models. So I’m keen to find a way of projecting a large good quality image.
That’s probably a good idea, i’ll have a go at reducing the the number of tiles and try that. I’ll let you know how I get on.
thanks
apologies, hardly ever use file sharing, tried to find that option last night but i guess it was too late!
should be there for you now
thanks
oops, wrote your reply to endless fix above, guess i’m only 1 sip of coffee into my day so far!
Its all good, @eric-s and I are interchangeable, except for the part where his landscape .skp skills are way better than mine! 
He’s is right in theory that the tiles cannot be recombined while retaining the maximum resolution. However there may be a compromise method that recombines the total image into say 4 or 5 sections with an acceptable level of degradation. It’s up to you to find a level of detail you can live with. Making 10 sections would yield a better result, either way you would need to drape each section onto the terrain before applying the projected textures to give the textures boundaries.
Can you share the big image you want to apply? as png if it’s possible please
Yes I tend to just hit reply to whomever with the hope it gets read ;). @endlessfix clearly articulated what I was hinting at re: a balanced approach to maintaining image res and reducing workload for draping onto terrain mesh.
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Here is a test with your model:
Combined about 10 tiles into 1 image:
From a bit of a distance, no visible difference:
Up close, a little bit of pixelation. If that’s unacceptable for you needs, I’d say take the time to drape and then sample and paste each image individually onto the terrain.
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Not too hard to do manually, full resolution, a little warped in areas but the only way around that is to UV map. I pretty much do this every time I bring one of our UAV projects into SU.
Tiled Image to Surface1.skp
