I have a mesh and a number of splines representing different landscape features.

I’m wondering what is the right way to go about making these elements visible. I’m new to max and I’m not sure whether they should be textured or decal’ed on, or if they should be spliced from the base mesh or even added atop it. I plan on using vray and I know that there are problems with coplanar faces rendering properly. if anyone has any quick pointers off the top of their head, I would really appreciate it!

thanks

splines have a render setting to make them visibile during a render. just turn it on

well actually I am looking to render them as surfaces, and the question is do I split them out from a base surface or use textures to differentiate between inside and outside the spline?

For large areas, you’ll end up needing some pretty high resolution mask images if you want to mask where the road/pond occurs.  But, you can also do some nice fades from one material to the next, and avoid the harsh change from grass to water.

Using something like Shapemerge (Create - Compound Objects) to create a different piece of geometry is sometimes a little easier.  You have more control over where the pond-road sits, and the materials you use will be a lot less complex.

To avoid coplanar faces, either cut the new geometry for the road pond out of the terrain, or extrude it slightly above the existing geometry.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Light leaks shouldn’t be an issue as long as you stay on top of your terrain.  Unless you’re rendering the inside of a Hobbit hole and there’s a road cut out over the top.  :)

If you split mesh and don’t detach the geometry, then you’ll need to use a Multi Sub-Object material.  Otherwise, you can use separate materials for each object.  You’re correct, this is more personal preference whether you want to detach or not. 

I’m not sure what you’re asking regarding the transparency and a split volume.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

oh, I just meant that a few of these “features” are water elements which could in theory be transparent - if I were not to give them bottoms and just made them surfaces with textures that had transparency I was curious what would happen. But i’ll probably avoid the transparency so no big deal.

thanks so much for the advice.

The problem now is doing the actual splitting. I have tried both vanillA and pro versions and they rarely produce results. Any advice?

Vanilla and Pro what?  Run us through what you’re doing, where it fails, and maybe a screen shot or two to illustrate.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

boolean is the operative word I neglected to mention. I don’t have my work in front of me but I’ll try to send stuff when I do. I was hoping there was maybe another option that I had overlooked.

I also did a little research on why my booleans did not work and the most promising answer seems to be that they weren’t solids. I’ll work on that but there were problems making them solids too. I’m just coming from Rhino where modeling is primarily about surfaces and you can project trim and split very easily, using surfaces and curves alone.

about my making my surface a solid - the surface is a very irregular triangulated mesh - and my instinct was to take its open edges and loft them to a flattened version of the same curve. It didn’t even come close to working and I moved on to try to extrude these curves and then slice through them with a plane...This worked mostly except a few planes having not been split were deleted with the extras and left me with holes that I wasn’t sure how to close.

Anyway, to make a long story short I think Im having trouble making booleans go because I don’t have proper solids to begin with...and I am not sure how to make them. if you could tell me how to go about this - I would be really grateful

thanks!

Sorry, I wasn’t thinking Boolean since it hadn’t been mentioned in the thread.

Stop where you are and rethink using Booleans.  As you’ve already found, they are largely unreliable when dealing with complex geometry.  Even though PreBooleans are much improved, they still have their shortcomings.  Booleans should really be a last resort.  And used with caution!  :)

Here’s an idea for a pond: Draw a spline in the outline of your pond shape.  Raise it above your terrain mesh.  Shapemerge the pond line with the terrain.  Convert to Editable Poly, select the faces inside the pond shape, and do a negative extrude for depth.  [edit] You may want to first make the edges of the pond planar, so your water doesn’t spill out! [/edit] Then either extrude the original spline slightly and place over top of the pond, or, if you want the volume of the water, detach a copy of the terrain pond bottom, flip the normals and cap it.  You will have to raise the water slightly above or below the pond bottom to avoid coplanar faces.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

looking into shapemerge i seems like what I’ve been looking for all along. the boolean stuff drove me absolutely crazy and I wasted a ton of time trying to make it work. still without my compu in front of me, the shapemerge sounds bout right

as for the making solids problem, do you have any advice on that front . I have a triangular mesh with an open edge with many vertices. My thoughts were to flattena second version of the curve and loft the two together...is there a better max way to do this that I don’t know about?

thanks so much!