Very Large Site Plan

[Anonymous]

We have a very large master planing project to start on next week. The site is 457 acres. The plan will include at least 500 residential units. Has anyone modeled a site this large before? Any one have any tips on how to manage a terrain of this size? Thanks

[Anonymous]

I worked on a master plan for a city neighborhood which was much smaller and probably less complex than yours will likely be. Less than 15 acres had buildings that were modeled in much detail and maybe 20 to 30 acres with simple grey boxes for existing buildings. There were also quite a few moderately detailed trees. The overall site was done as a single ArchiCAD project file with the detailed buildings created in separate files and merged into the site.

This project was about the largest I would want to develop in a single file. Yours should probably be divided into several manageable segments for development and editing which can be merged into an overall plan for modeling and rendering of the entire project.

The site models within the segments should also be subdivided since ArchiCAD seems to have some trouble with very large complex meshes. I usually use separate meshes for the roadways and the terrain within the blocks. This keeps them clear and manageable.

The buildings are best modeled separately and linked into the site model or added as library parts.

There has been quite a bit of discussion of this before. I recommend that you search ArchiGuide for more info.

[Anonymous]

Mark-

I am the Town Landscape Architect for a New Urbanist development, and I have our 600 Acre town modeled in Archicad, with houses to date, civic and commercial building, parks, etc.. Archicad has no trouble handling the file size (121 MB w/ numerous linked files such as topo, etc.). We use the file for everything, collateral sales materials, construction, etc.; you just have to be very careful about your layer mix.

The terrain is another issue. i have done some limited terrain modeling, but found that trying to do the whole site somewhat useless as grades were changing for roads, building pad, walls, and what not. I do some individual houses that are embedded in the master file.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply's. I have actually managed to model the entire 457 acre + some surrounding terrain with 10' contours in architerra. The site has some extreme topography and the 10' contours were enough for detail. I think the terrain contains around 60,000 elevation points! I was shocked at how easily archicad handled the terrain in both 2 and 3 dimensions. I have yet to complete the roads and other additions to the project. I am a little concerned with how to efficently modify the terrain on a large scale. AFAIK the AT plateu tool will only create flat terrain. I want to find a way to gently modify slopes and grades. Any experiences or Ideas?

[Anonymous]

Mark wrote:
Thanks for the reply's. I have actually managed to model the entire 457 acre + some surrounding terrain with 10' contours in architerra. The site has some extreme topography and the 10' contours were enough for detail. I think the terrain contains around 60,000 elevation points! I was shocked at how easily archicad handled the terrain in both 2 and 3 dimensions. I have yet to complete the roads and other additions to the project. I am a little concerned with how to efficently modify the terrain on a large scale. AFAIK the AT plateu tool will only create flat terrain. I want to find a way to gently modify slopes and grades. Any experiences or Ideas?

I'm working on a model of 830 acres, 49 contourlines (one every meter), about 150 residential houses (very detailed...) and roads. No terrain details. The roads are made with an Autocad road application (heavy stuff). All in all my computer doesn't manage this so I will remake the roads in ArchiTerra instead and maybe reduce the detail level of the houses. The attachment is a view from the model.

I actually wanted to try how much stuff I could load into the model and stil be able to use my machine (Compaq Evo 1,8GHz, 32MB RAM... I know I shouldn't do this on such a weak machine but if I reduce my model to half the size it will work fine and it's still a very large model...running this on my cheap laptop is great in my mind).

/Mats