Terrain Rendering

the trick is to get a google image of your site(if you have google proffessional you can save at high res.). Then use that as the material for you landscape, you also want to make a bump out of the image. See attached, all the is straight from revit, using the google image for the material.

Scott, that's pretty awesome. So, to get the variation over such a large swath of terrain, how did you get it so it doesn't look like it's tiling? Did you did you scale a single texture image to be massive? Did you create lots of sub-regions and assign different materials?

Wow, that makes my renderings look like I used crayons! Great job. :beer:

Thanks Scott! Great job! How did you map the image from google? Used a single big dimensions texture image? And the bump file? From the same image? Do you know any tutorial with the steps to do this? Thanks in advance!

Yes its a large image, 1 mile or more square approx. 30mb jpg. Then its applied to the material of the toposurf. and a bump is made(grey scale). I can't remember which material type gave me the most bump value. I did the same for the sand under the water.

I'll try it, then i'll show the result (if it's ok!)!
Thanks

Awesome tip!
for those of you not familiar with creating bump maps:

Make a copy of the texture, call it texture_bump (or something like that).
Open in a Photo Editing Program (standard windows app will do)
Edit so it turns into a grayscale picture. The more contrast in the picture, the better the depth in Revit.
Save and close
In Revit: open the material editor and choose the terrain material. Then go to the Render Appearance Tab
Apply the original texture
Apply the texture_bump to the bump-texture under Bump (you may have to scroll or use the fly-out arrow besides Bump to see this material)
Don't forget the checkbox...

Have fun!

If you would like high res ortho imagery that arrives on your desktop as tiled tif files, there's a great website for that:



Read the tutorial on how to download the images, then have a blast, it's so much nicer than screen shots from Google.

A really useful tool for creating maps of all kinds from a bitmap (and fixing tiling / shadowing issues with bitmaps) is Crazybump: http://www.crazybump.com/

You can use the demo up to a certain size of image for free. I use it all the time!

As for the site, if you don't want to go with the Google image idea (which is a great one) because of time constraints, you can create much better rendering textures by layering.

Revit 2011 allows you to change the default color to an image, but it also allows you to set it to other more complex things, like Noise.

Noise takes two colors and mixes them together randomly, with faded edges and such so that you get a 'TV Static' kind of result.

Thing is, you can then tell Revit to use Bitmaps instead of a solid color, and it will mix the two bitmaps together.

So if you make a Noise, set the scale to be rather large, and use two different bitmaps (one of grassy site and one of rocky dirt) you can begin to get a better looking default site material that you can throw at anything.

You can even have the Noise have Noise, in that the two elements being mixed can themselves be Noise.

There are also Wood and Marble and other Procedural Shaders that you can layer together to make more complex materials.

I'll try to post an example when I've got time to do so!