Smoothing GE Terrain

I apologize as Im sure this is simple or been covered. But in older versions of SU we have imported terrain for models (down to perhaps 4-6 acres square area) and then been able to go in and tweak/modify the terrain based on our field measures (shot with laser). We havent had a need to do this for a bit and now with SU2017 and 2018PRO when the terrain comes in from the location data we will have a lot of very long creases/triangles in the surface that simply wont subdivide. So using the add detail tool, with any number of iterations, we dont gain any ground. We have, and use, the Artisan plugin, as well as SubD and Quadface tools. Does anyone know of at tutorial or routine to take the imported terrain and make it into smaller and more uniform (more easily manipulable) faces?

Note that from version 2017 on the terrain and the satellite images come from Digital Globe as the Google data is no longer available for this kind of purposes.

The quality and availability of the Digital Globe data has been discussed here before. In our parts the image quality is vastly inferior to what Google supplied, and terrain info is nonexistent. Frustrating, as I live in a country where the national survey data (lidar scans etc.) has been made a free for all resource.

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You can create a new, more refined terrain mesh from the imported Add Location terrain mesh.
Use the following plugins in the order listed below.

TIG: Drape Cpoints v1.1 … Drapes a user specified regular grid of grouped cpoints over a ‘mesh’

TIG: Triangulate Points v1.1 … Creates a triangulated mesh from selected guide-point cloud.

See this example model:

+1

Here’s the Digital Globe location snapshot from the example model above.

Digital Globe Location Snapshot


And here’s an image exported from our City of Janesville WI GIS website. (taken 2016)

Thanks Geo. That worked out well. I have been able to create a much better mesh. Now to figure out how to apply the satellite image to the mesh will be next. In my first attempts I am getting the prompt from trimble with regards to not being able to apply street veiw blah blah… I cropped and saved the image as a JPG and imported it back into SU and have been playing around with the projected texture but things are getting all scrambled up somewhere in the process.

I need to b able to edit the mesh created via your process with the site image details applied to the mesh.

I really enjoy SU as I have been with it since it came online but I was very fearful of all of these issues when it fell into Trimbles hands. Very sad to have established practices that worked so well go “poof” after they’ve got the hook set ($$$$.$$).

You should be able to use the Terrain Snapshot Image that came along with the Digital Globe terrain model.

See this post for ideas…

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