Hello,
With my work, I need to deal with large landscape meshes with large amounts of total vertices.
For example, 1.4*1.6km2 landscape with vertices every 0.2 or 0.4m in each direction. This is super complex and dense, and does not work as a single mesh, and must be broken into a tile grid for editing so the computer can work.
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Given I only adjust mesh vertex Z-values, I am wondering if there might be a much faster mesh which only allows Z editing, and omits X and Y calculations for speed? Perhaps it can be converted between regular and Z-only mesh?
If this is not possible, does anyone have any recommendations on software which can edit large meshes in the Z axis only?
-Jeremy
sounds like you might benefit from a dedicated polygon sculpting program like zbrush.
Rhino is way better at meshes than it used to be, but zbrush is light years ahead for mesh editing.
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Thank you so much for your message Kyle, I was thinking the same thing.
However, rhinoceros has the great benefit of having grasshopper work alongside it, and for this particular use case, grasshopper makes all the difference in terms of surface analysis whilst editing. For example, I can turn on soft transform with a fall of radius of 5 m, and have the contour component running in the background. When I make an adjustment to the mesh, the contours update. Perhaps this wouldn’t be possible if it was a Zbrush type mesh
From Z-Brush
“Unlike other 3D software, ZBrush doesn’t have a 3D space scene in which the camera (the user point of view) can be moved; instead 3D objects are manipulated in front of the camera, within the canvas. Think of the ZBrush canvas as being like a window within your house, looking out onto the 3D world beyond. Objects can be moved around outside the window, but you can’t move the window itself. This is a key element to understanding and being comfortable within ZBrush, and is actually part of the reason why ZBrush is able to work with millions of polygons in real-time. An animation package must track every element of your scene at all times, from all angles, regardless of whether something is visible to the camera at the moment or not. That’s a lot of system resources being reserved for scene management. ZBrush takes all those resources and focuses them on a single object, letting you do things that wouldn’t be possible in any other program.”
Stepping back a second, I’m trying to figure out a way to deal with a large surface with constant resolution (~0.3m grid size), and without rhino crashing on me. Given that it’s Z manipulation only, I thought that omitting x and y would direct computational power to the Z axis.
A gridded mesh in rhino is a clunky workaround; but might be the only choice.
Do you know if there’s any way to edit this type of file format directly in arcgis or qgis, so that you can see what is happening in a 3dimensional manner? I suppose that once something has been edited, perhaps the model builder software in ARCGIS could visualise slope and conjuring, but not on the fly. That’s the advantage of mesh editing in rhino, is that it automatically takes the updated mesh And delivers all the analysis components results. Unfortunately rhino seems great for live analysis, but quite slow for this type of large format editing. Zbrush possibly is not made for large scale landscaping editing with analysis either?
I don’t know of an application where you can move individual vertices as a heightmap. There is Leveller that can edit as a heightmap interactively … it’s kind of like Photoshop for 2.5D data in a grid format (raster). It can work with very large files.
Its not really a GIS application though so the analysis functions may be limited.
Global Mapper might be a better fit if you need analysis tools. The description indicates it has terrain painting, which suggests it might work in the same way as Leveller. I have not used Global Mapper myself so you would have to try it out.
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Cdordoni, thank you so much for your help and responses.
I will look into them, and they look promising indeed.
Cheers,
Jeremy
