France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
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Terrain Generator plug-in
Hello,
Here's the Terrain Generator plug-in (111 kB) able to generate some terrain shapes from one or more rooms. Once this plug-in is installed, the following dialog box is shown when you choose the additional Tools > Generate 3D terrain from rooms menu item (en français, le menu Outils > Générer terrain 3D à partir des pièces), after selecting some rooms in the plan.
It displays a 3D preview of the rooms on a grid where you can move up dans down the grid points with the mouse to generate a shape like the following one.
Once you click on OK, a new shape is generated and used as the 3D model of a new piece of furniture added to the edited home and placed over the selected rooms.
Here are a few options to help you design a terrain more efficiently: - The dialog box of the plug-in is resizable. - You may turn around the preview of the terrain by dragging and dropping the mouse in the empty zone around the preview. - You may zoom in and out with mouse wheel or with a drag and drop in the empty zone while pressing Alt key. - When magnestism is on, points around the dragged point are also more or less elevated according to their distance to that point. - When magnestism is off (toggling magnetism can be done by pressing Alt key under Windows or command key under macOS), only the elevation of the dragged point is changed. - When alignment is on (activating it can be done by pressing Shift key), points around the dragged point are more or less elevated along all the current horizontal axis. - Pressing the Escape key will escape the current elevation change. - The Reset elevations button will reset all the elevations already set. - The entered elevations are stored in properties of the rooms to be able to edit again a new shape if the resulting one isn't correct, and you may even enlarge the dimensions of these rooms meanwhile. These properties are saved with the SH3D file.
Note that if you select more than a room, they must be at the same elevation to be able to use this plug-in. Keep also in mind that the grid step is fixed, so don't try to design giant surfaces for which there might be too many points to handle.
Hope you'll like it. I'm looking forward to discovering the landscapes you'll design with this plug-in.
Netherlands
Joined: Sep 26, 2009
Post Count: 3977
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Re: Terrain Generator plug-in
Thank you for this terrain generator, it's a start for something very useful. After playing around a bit, I think this plug-in needs a bit of fine-tuning.
- The interface is a bit crude. A mouse is not precise enough to do precise editing. - Results show mainly a series of sharp spikes, or peaks, in the landscape. It's very hard to make something nice.
A few suggestions: - Add a numerical control for the radius of the "spikes". By making the radius larger, the slope will be more gradual. - Add a numerical control for the desired height of the spikes. Now you have to guess at the result. - Connect adjacent walls of the rooms. If one elevates a room, the adjacent room should also be elevated. A hilly terrain is often made more usable by making banks, or terraces (think rice terraces in China). The rooms follow the contours of the landscape. Maybe the interface of the AdvancedEdit "edit points" could be used to elevate certain lines of a room. Even if adjacent lines wouldn't follow, this would allow easy editing of heights.
Can't wait to see version 2 :-)
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Hans
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
Post Count: 9417
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Re: Terrain Generator plug-in
Thanks for your feedback I released a version 1.0.1 to fix missing borders when terrain smallest coordinates are negative.
The grid step is 50cm for the moment. It may be quite a large value but it seemed to be a good value for mid-size gardens to much larger terrains used for landscape purpose.
I may add some numerical fields in the future but sorry, don't hope that the elevation of other objects around the generated shape will be automatically adjusted. I think that it would too often lead to unsatisfying results along slopes. Anyway, as rooms and walls don't have any elevation parameter, this is not even possible to program such a feature in a plug-in (Advanced Editing plug-in included).
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
Russia
Joined: Aug 11, 2017
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Re: Terrain Generator plug-in
Dear Puybaret! This is great tool, thank you! Now it's nice to make hills, but hard to make pits, so base thickness of room is needed.
It could be taken from current level thickness.
Or it may be option to elevate all points of the upper surface to specified distance. For example: I know that my lowest local terrain point (pit) is -500мм, so I elevate all upper points to 500 and lowering few local point to ziro level
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
Post Count: 9417
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Re: Terrain Generator plug-in
Any hole you'll draw in your room(s) will appear in the plug-in dialog box too. For example, if you want to draw a two level house on a slope like the one attached to this post, you could draw a room that surrounds the garage like the green room in the following image. If you don't know how to draw a room with a hole, look at this video or draw two rooms which won't include the house surface.
Then, if you select this room and the path to the garage to build a terrain from them with the plug-in, you can design a slope which will show the hole of the garage.
After a few tries, you'll get the following nice little house that you may visit in 3D here.
---------------------------------------- HouseOnSlope.sh3d
(405904 bytes)
(Download count: 933)
(House on a slope designed with Terrain Generator plug-in)
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
Russia
Joined: Aug 11, 2017
Post Count: 135
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Re: Terrain Generator plug-in
Hello!
I spoke about the case of creating a predominantly flat relief with local underestimations (pits); not about cutting vertical holes. Like flat terra with pond
