3DSMax Airport design - joining surfaces without overlap

Trespassers · February 28, 2018 at 11:28 PM

Dear all,

The next topic I'm facing in airport design is how to connect intersections to a runway.

I tried to come as close as possible from the runway at max zoom level without overlapping, but I still get a line of missing surface.

[Blocked Image: http://i65.tinypic.com/2rxfkn4.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://i63.tinypic.com/egviat.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://i68.tinypic.com/1265kbd.jpg]

Initially I tried overlapping the surfaces, but this caused troubles.

I also tried designing runway, taxiways and apron as splines, i.e. without such "open connection", but I had big troubles in getting a mesh... below is a typical issue I was facing with this method: I draw cuts to define the mesh, but at some places they won't connect whatever I do, resulting in fancy (and bad) polygon surfaces..

[Blocked Image: http://i65.tinypic.com/21cuo2d.jpg]

For that reason I reverted to the Tuto technique of designing the runway as a rectangle and other surfaces as separate splines. Has anybody some hint how to connect then different surfaces to prevent holes in rendering ?

Thanks in advance

Cheers

Antoine

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · March 1, 2018 at 8:47 AM Official Post

I think this needs to be done with the vertex weights (not an expert on this)

larrylynx · March 1, 2018 at 10:58 AM

Hi

Looking at the screenshot I see several areas of concern

Bad poly spans across several others, this will cause any welds in those areas to fail and will prevent the two meshes being joined

Long thins polys can cause rendering errors. Get rid of them, find a better way to structure the mesh. If you were to do this in 3d rather than 2d the rendering artifact would be very obvious

The extra area in the centre simple adds polys for no reason and causes those long polys, as does spline modeling with the quadify mesh command. I do not use this method for that very reason, its too unpredictable. Better to build things buy hand in some cases using the create command in the polygon section.

I have very quickly suggested some improvements (in yellow). Don't be scared to add futher edges, remove edges and collapse lots of verts together. The area in the centre is not seen in the final airport unless you add a texture to it, ie, not the background texture. When vertex shading, this area will be black and therefore invisible.

Always look at a mesh and think how you can improve it. Its nice to just press a button and think its done the best job but sometimes there is nothing better than the human eye

Try to never have polys with more than 4 edges, in the bottom left of the image I can see a poly with 6 or more. Add extra edges using the cut comman to for the mesh to ne more predicitable, Did I mention..I DON'T LIKE QUADIFY FOR THIS REASON. Don't assume the program will add polys that look as good as the ones I added in this area. it could and probably will add long this polys like I suggested in blue

Steve

Trespassers · March 1, 2018 at 11:39 AM

That's exactly my point Steve.

I'm learning by doing, trial and error.

This example was a test I did by quadifying mesh in a set of splines and then reworking by hand.

As you say, quadify is very unpredictable as soon as you start having more than a single square runway.

It results in sometimes long, intricate polys and needs a lot of iterative cleaning, cutting, moving, etc.

The picture above shows an area I had only started cleaning, therefore the intricate mess. My issue then was by no mean I managed to link the inner grass part of the bay to the rest by cutting edges, therefore the bad polys.

Now, after a few hours fiddling about with that labyrinthine 3DSMax to try fixing one issue after the other, I start to get what you meant with the create function and the clockwise direction. I sure try it that way for the next design.

Thanks

Antoine