3D texture alignment on imported 3ds object

[Anonymous]

Hey,

I´ve imported a terrain 3ds object into archicad and made a material with an ortographic photo of the area to place on the object, set the dimensions etc. But theres a problem with the alignment. Supposedly you fix it with the 3d texture alignment tool, but in this case it doesnt do anything, nothing changes as I use it. Also if I position the OBJECT according to the TEXTURE (which stays put), save the project, close archicad and come back, the texture seems to have sifted to some irregular place again. Is the 3d texture alignment tool supposed to work on custom imported objects also, or only on slabs, meshes etc? If it doesnt work on imported objects, has anyone tried importing the 3ds with the texture already on it?

Thanks for any input

[Anonymous]

Hi Jussi,

The 'align 3d texture' option doesn't work for objects. They can have their own texture alignment code built in, but by default the texture will start from project zero. Have a look at 'VERT' and 'COOR' in the GDL reference guide for examples if you want to edit this yourself.

You will get much better results all around if you re-drew the terrain using the mesh tool in ArchiCAD. Do you have access to the original surveyors 2d data with contours or spot levels on?

[Anonymous]

Hello Peter,

My current workflow works pretty well for big areas used in urban planning competitions etc such as the one im working on now (some 5km x 7km or so). The way I do it is I import the dwg contours to 3D studio max -> Terrain -> Pro-optimizer. Without the optimization part the file would be pretty useless. And theres no or minimal need for the terrain to be adjustable so the imported 3ds approach is fine, except for the mapping problem.

I´ll look into your GDL advice, thanks! Do you know (I havent tried yet) if you could just glue the texture to the object in 3d studio and then export it as 3ds -> import it to archicad and voila?

-Jussi

[Anonymous]

Jussi wrote:
...Do you know (I havent tried yet) if you could just glue the texture to the object in 3d studio and then export it as 3ds -> import it to archicad and voila?

I'm not sure to honest, I've never tried! Give it a go and let us know perhaps?

Out of curiosity, what does the 'Pro-optimizer' in 3d studio do exactly? If it just reduces the number of nodes, you can do a similar thing in ArchiCAD by adjusting the magic wand settings to reduce the number of points it creates when tracing over contours.