Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

3D painting on surfaces

Anonymous
Not applicable
It would be nice to "paint" sidewalks, parking lines, and other similar elements directly onto a mesh or slab and then be able to give it a height (either positive or negative) as well as a different material. Maybe it could be generated by projecting a polygon from a fill or set of lines.
4 REPLIES 4
Dwight
Newcomer
THERE'S A WAY.

Take a top view of the surface requiring the details, define the linework you need, export the image to Photoshop, draw and color the effect and then make a material texture from the colored image.

Photoshop will stroke edges. Once you've established a color for grass and a color for roadway, the stroke function applies curb lines or sidewalk lines...

The corner of the texture image is aligned to the corner of the mesh with the 3D align tool.

This is detailed in an exercise in my book where an entire site plan, roadways and all surface features are stretched over a mesh. The attached is a rough OpenGL view - the rendering is much smoother since the mesh is commanded to be smooth.

ANOTHER way to make a parking lot is Mark Beauman's commercial PARKING object that organizes stalls and also places cars randomly.
Dwight Atkinson
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
See also this tip from 4 years ago... I didn't use bevels, noise and the cool things that Dwight refers to though.

http://www.archispectives.com/tips/121-textures.htm

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
The image mapping is one way we do it, but when animations require that you be closer to the "site model" and you need to see the curb having a different height than the road, which is a different height than the grass. In this case we make multiple copies of the original mesh and start subracting the road from the grass, etc. Then we glue it back together.
Anonymous
Not applicable
A real 3d painting tool would slow down your computer alot, archicad is slow that it is in 3d and with big models.
I think a better way (and only way) is to make a thin slab that you tile a detailed roadtexture on. That's what we are doing in games to make it work and look good, a real detailed 3d painting on a large mesh is a very NO NO! It's okey when you are looking at it from a far distance like Dwights method, but when you are closer you need to map all things on it's own.

In games you work with layers, could for example be like this :
1. Overview layer (not detailed at all, only background colours, you can se there is a road, and grass) This is what you se when you are far away.
2. More detailed (higher dpi, the map is in sections, you see sharp outlines between road and grass, maybe som small changes in textures) maybe even easy roadlines. The section you are in, this sectiontexture shows and applies above 1.
3. Detailed texture (3d painting tool maybe is alowed here), if you look down you se very detailed texture, grass, stones and so on. You see this maybe 5 meters from you viewpoint.