Texture problem on steep sloped mesh

[Anonymous]

Hi.

I hope some of you out there can help me. I'm trying to project a texture onto a terrain in AC12, but somehow the texture shows up wrong on the steepest parts of the mesh. Is there a way to correct this? Is seems like the texture on these steep parts are projected vertically onto the terrain instead of planar like I want it to.

Thanks for any help

[Anonymous]

just my two cents worth here >

if the jpg offered is the image that has problems > my opinion is that it looks very realistic vs. having the steep slopes with a green texture on them. a very steep slope in the natural environment would not have much if any vegetation on it.

to me it looks very good - realistic.

[Anonymous]

I've also had this mesh problem for sometime now. In my experience it only occurs on sections of mesh where the faces are steeper than 45 degrees. When modelling building sites this rarely poses a problem since they tend to be semi-flat. Make sure that if the contours are at 1m intervals that they are spaced a minimum of 1m apart in plan. Obviously where you have steep cliffs like in your example this may not be possible.

If you want to keep the contours accurate then there is no way around it I'm afraid but if you are willing to sacrifice accuracy for correct texture mapping I'd go around and spread out the contours where the texture ripping is occuring to make the terrain flatter.

[vfrontiers]

Just wanted to voice that this is still an issue in AC25!

If any solution has been found, please let me know!

[Minh Nguyen]

Hi Duane,

Thank you very much for the report and I am very sorry about the experience!

After some reseach, I found that the Mesh, as most 3D things in AC, has box-type Texture projection. This means there is an imaginary box around the mesh, the texture painted on its six sides, and texture on each mesh-triangle is projected from one of the six sides. The chosen side is the one with the closest direction to the plane of the triangle. So the steep triangles receive their Texture from the vertical sides, and probably from a completely different section of the Texture image than the neighboring non-steep triangles, which cause discontinuity.

What we would need is a Planar projection on the Mesh - all Mesh faces receive texture from one (horizontal) plane. Unfortunately, this cannot be set on Meshes. But, if you convert the Mesh to Morph and Select only the upper surface (Ctrl-Shift subelement selection) Planar texture projection may be set in the settings dialog.

This way the Texture fits the Morph, but the projection origin and direction will be modified. We can create a new Surface for the Morph and rotating the Surface Image with the desired angle. Then select the upper Surface and Align the 3D Texture with Set Origin.

I hope it gives a proper workaround in this case. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Best regards,

Minh

[vfrontiers]

Minh,

Thank you for the perfect explanation... 

As much as I love Archicad (and that's a lot)... there are always these 1% issues that frustrate me. 

I cannot give up MESH for site contours... Just not WORKABLE for the many edits it will receive over the life of the project.

But I will consider the MORPHING idea and see if it's workable.

(BTW... I'm just now reading this from your sept. post!)

[Luis M Dias]

I've had the exact same issue and came here to find if I there was a real solution instead of silly workarounds like the ones being offered here.

I have to ask, is it really that incredibly difficult to have this option? More and more, we as architects rely on ortofotomaps to create a 3d context for our terrains, and meshes are the logical solution for this.