I have a 2D file with 2D tree cells in the correct geographic locations and need to now place 3D tree cells onto existing 3d meshes in the same XY locations as the 2D plan. I have tried several options now without success.
I was hoping to use the stencil tool to project a point onto the surface and then export the XYZ point coordinates and use them to place the 3D trees, but it seems that it can't project a point, I presume it can't make a mesh with 1 point.
Is there a tool that can move an element vertically to a surface or something similar. Can anyone suggest something that I can try
I am using MicroStation v16.311, we also have OpenRoads latest version and OpenBuildings update 9 if there is anything in them that may help.
Regards,
John
Check the Populate Tool (Visualization > Utilities > Populate)
Please check this Wiki
Thanks for your help Leonard but it looks like the linked wiki has gone walkabout.
How to place multiple cells (Trees) over a given area of a surface
This won't help him - specific mention of x,y co-ords in a 2D file.
Thanks Leonard,
I looked at that tool but I don't see how I can place the trees in the same XY coordinates as we have them in the 2D plan, I could place them using the single command but 700 trees???
John.
You could try "Move to contact" tool.
First use replace cells tool to replace 2D cells with 3D and then select them and run the tool.
Thanks Oto,
Will try that.
an alternative to move to contact is to use accudraw after replacing the cells. lock accudraw to the z axis and use the nearest snap.
Thanks David,
That will work but too many trees to do manually, 700 is just the 1st stage.
Hi John,
I'm pretty sure that it would be easy to write a VBA macro which could insert cells on the mesh with known X&Y coordinates and the intersecting Z coordinate would be calculated automatically. I made a similar macro a couple of months ago for another member to find the closest point on a B-spline surface from a specified point. What you are needing is similar, but instead needing to calculate an intersection point to a mesh along the Z vector (either up or down) from source X&Y coordinates.
John Davidson said:700 is just the 1st stage.
Good luck with that! I hope CONNECT is capable of handling that number if the trees are cells with any decent level of detail. In my experience, MicroStation is not the software you want for that kind of thing; V8i certainly can't handle that amount of geometry whatsoever but I don't know if CONNECT fares any better. I'm not even sure using Shared Cells and Fast Cells enabled will help much, compared to what I used to do many years ago in 3D Studio Max with Evermotion Tree's made into V-Ray Proxies.
The other thing worth considering is that even if you can place all these tree's and aren't finding slowdown due to large amounts of geometry, the trees are going to (initially) look terrible because they will all be identical in scale and rotation. With the aforementioned V-Ray Proxies, I used to have a Maxscript where I could select the trees and set maximum and minimum range percentage values for scale and rotation (from their original size and rotation) so that they had a more natural variation in appearance. Again this is something that probably could be written in VBA although calculated randomness is far from truly random
Barry,
Barry Lothian said:the trees are going to (initially) look terrible because they will all be identical in scale and rotation
The Populate tool has settings to randomize scale and rotation, so you can avoid that problem,
It also automatically places the cells as Shared Cells which definitely reduces the impacts on system resources when working with large populations.
Regards,Ron