creating 'cave' with mesh tool

[lparke]

had an interesting challenge from a client this afternoon. they own/operate and underground storage lease facility. Even though they have real life drive through videos showing how the facilities work in general they often have a hard time describing to potential out of town leasees how individual 'parcels' and buildings look within the underground structure and there relationship to the ground surface. We're still negotiating what the deliverables will be but i suspect, a model of the building within the 'cave', section cut showing relationship to ground plane and perhaps a short animation with a series of still images.

difficult to explain the facility but here's a weblink ... http://www.springfieldunderground.com/

The buildings inside this 'cave' are pretty straight forward, except that certain vertical surfaces will need to heal to the vertical face of the mesh, but i'm sure can be accomplished with SEO's. My question is how to get started creating the space with the mesh tool. We have or will obtain x,y,z data on the ground surface, the driving surface of the 'cave' and the ceiling of the 'cave'. I suspect i would start with the ground surface (solid) mesh with a significant depth to it. Create a second and third mesh representing the floor and the ceiling of the cave to act as operators. I haven't quite figured out the construction method of these meshes nor the sequence of SEO to make the void. Once that's done, I'll probably have to 'fake' the resultant vertical surface of the first mesh. Is there a way to add points to these faces and pull them in/out? I can't locate an option on the pet palette for this. Then what method would you recommend for the natural stone free form pillars? additional meshes?

any recommendations are appreciated.

[Anonymous]

lparke,

I don't think you even need SEO's here. If you try for true surfaces, you will create an unusually high polycount I would suspect.

I would create all below ground caves with ordinary walls, slabs and roofs.
Then allow the fills to perform a merge with a mesh for the top side "ordinary" ground.

Create stacked walls or two stories of sloped walls to recreate the cave walls that slope away from floor to halfway up and then reslope back in to ceiling Use roofs for sloped floors. Use several slabs for the ceilings that appear tiered. Or Complex profiled walls to recreate the "bulge".

Then use a texture map to create the rough look of the stone. Get good photography of the rock walls, possibly several to avoid an obvious repeat. Usually medium quality jpg's can produce pretty good images for renders and walk throughs.

Controlling the fills of the cave walls and slabs will cause them to merge correctly. I think the walls should not be complex, merely super thick "earth" or whatever fill you choose or create for this project.

HTH,
Snap
PS If you need a close up render for "wow" factor, make a separate model of a "true" surface with SEO and every other trick you can think of. This would be a good time to learn about parametric textures in Lightworks or Artlantis.