Hope somebody might be able to help me. I am a newbie to SU but have 20 years experience in modeling.
I am creating a golf course from a DWG file. My workflow is
Import DWG
Explode
Select Contours
Using TOPO Shaper create terrain at 3m intervals (takes bout 60 minutes)
Add Terrain to its own layer (tag)
Select all terrain shapes (greens, bunkers etc) in the DWG and Copy.
Open the terrain layer (group)
Paste in place
Drape (takes about 60 minutes)
Add material to each draped face.
So this all works very nicely and i get good results. My issue is that i am seeing some sharp edges in the terrain that when rendered look very artificial, a golf course shoud be nice a smooth. I have tried all maner of smoothing but with no avail. I have Artisan but whn i use that for smoothing it destroys the shapes of each feature.
Can you post your model so folks can see what’s you’re working with. If it’s too big then copy a problematic section, one green or sand trap into a fresh file and post that, with the contours and terrain before draping included.
I’d say this is part of your problem. 3m is quite a large grid.
if it was me I would create a patchwork of sections with a level of detail appropriate to the terrain. A long flat fairway can be a large grid, even a green can be quite flat, but a bunker needs a lot smaller mesh to get the smooth shapes you are after. I certainly wouldn’t use a small mesh for all of it, you would kill your computer, but plan out the detail areas.
Here’s a very basic example of what I mean, the smaller mesh creates smoother surface.
Thanks I had thought of that but it is not really feasible in terms of man hours. Off the top of my head if I included a tighter mesh for all the problem areas there would be in excess of 300 tighter meshes required.
What I don’t understand is when I create the initial terrain before I drape the shapes it is perfect. It’s the act of draping that adds these sharp shaded lines.
I’m very impressed with sketchup but maybe it’s just not able for large outdoor spaces with this type of detail. I’ve worked in other design software with the same grid spacing and never seen this before