How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:16:33 GMT

Thanks very much for all your suggestions and will try them as we get the opportunities so we can build a bigger toolkit. We managed to find that CaddPro does already have a macro to do this and used it this time round.

Thanks again.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Oto — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:46:07 GMT

Please if possible update it for CONNECT edition or release source code and I could update it myself. Someone disconnected from reality decided that populate tool is vizualization so such tool is mising from Contextcapture Editor(a Frankenstein software by mutating Microstation+Descartes) so it is still necessary.

Should not be too hard to update. Jon also has updated the progress bar code for CE so it could help.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Barry Lothian — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:25:08 GMT

Morning Ron,

Yes I recall seeing that before and I'm sure it was quite effective for its purpose.

In my post above, I'm not referring to animations but still images. Animations can get away with much less detailed scene content typically, your animation is a classic example due to its speed; it moves quick enough that the human eye doesn't get a chance to focus in on the detail of the tree's. From what I can make out, it looks as though the 3 trees are much less detailed than the equivalent's I'm referring to e.g. https://evermotion.org/shop/show_product/archmodels-vol-163/12684

Respectfully, I think also our definitions of 'Very realistic' differ somewhat, although my area of interest is in Arch Viz and your example was a new highway ( I think?) so the aesthetic and LOD are perhaps quite different for those differing fields of work.

To illustrate what I consider relevant examples of that quality classification from my perspective:

Around the same time as your animation was created, Alex Roman released a spectacular CG film made in entirely in 3DS Max, V-Ray, After Effects and Premiere. To this day, its still regarded in the 3D community as a masterpiece of CGI showcasing architecture from a photographic perspective:
www.youtube.com/watch
Bertrand Benoit (BBB3) https://www.flickr.com/photos/bbb3viz/
Alfa Smyrna (Pixela) https://alfasmyrna.com
Peter Guthrie http://www.peterguthrie.net

I'm also not making a direct comparison of your example against the works of the above artists. My point is as I said before is that MicroStation cannot produce this quality of work, its simply not capable and doesn't have access to the superior render engines which make it possible, either.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Barry Lothian — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 07:15:11 GMT

Morning Yrjo,

Ron Jones already provided that suggestion above with a detailed workflow.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Yrjo Ala-Heikkila — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 06:54:33 GMT

That vba macro worked quite well for placing trees. Unfortunately I haven't found time for migrating it from 32bit V8i to 64bit Microstation CE. Maybe you could try 'populate content tool' which is located in vizualisation tool box.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Ron Jones — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 15:54:35 GMT

Barry,
Here's a link to a very realistic animation I created in V8i about 9 years ago that contains over 23000 3D trees. While navigation slowed down with all geometry visible it was easy to turn off levels that contain the trees and navigate more fluidly.

Regards,
Ron

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Barry Lothian — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 15:15:23 GMT

Ah well that's a good option to have built-in already. It's not a tool I've used as I don't use MicroStation for 3D work where mass amounts of geometry needs populated, I've find MicroStation is good for modelling buildings etc.. but when it comes to trying to create Arch Viz images and adding all sorts of content to enhance realism (different grass types, Trees, individual stones/leaves, people, vehicles etc..) it simply can't handle the data and navigating grinds to a halt. Performance in CONNECT might be a bit better, but in my previous tests it still struggled. Couple that with poor quality render engines in V8i/CONNECT(compared to V-Ray/Octane/Corona/Cycles etc..), I limit my 3D work in MS these days purely technical.

With any luck your suggestion will give John what he's looking for.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Ron Jones — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:47:35 GMT

Barry,

[quote userid="60593" url="~/products/microstation/f/microstation-forum/230713/how-to-place-3d-trees-on-an-existing-mesh/715599"]the trees are going to (initially) look terrible because they will all be identical in scale and rotation[/quote]

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

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Oto — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 14:21:52 GMT

Maybe this is useful - communities.bentley.com/.../macro-to-place-random-cells-on-dtm

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Barry Lothian — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 10:07:41 GMT

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.

[quote userid="5334" url="~/products/microstation/f/microstation-forum/230713/how-to-place-3d-trees-on-an-existing-mesh/715477"]700 is just the 1st stage.[/quote]

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

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:01:38 GMT

Thanks David,

That will work but too many trees to do manually, 700 is just the 1st stage.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

David Trejo-Rodriguez — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:10:02 GMT

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.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 22:34:34 GMT

Thanks Ron,

Will also try that.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 22:33:57 GMT

Thanks Oto,

Will try that.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Ron Jones — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 18:54:03 GMT

Hi John,

Try the following:

In the 2D design file Select all of the 2d trees
Key-in EXPORT ELEMENT then set Prefix: XY= and set Separator: Comma then click the Single button to export the coordinates of the selected elements to a text file
(for example D:\textfile.txt).
Edit the resulting text file and replace all occurrences of xy=, with xy=
This will remove the unnecessary commas next to the = symbols
Save the edited text file.
In the 3D design file rotate view to TOP and display only the existing 3D meshes you wish to place trees upon. This simplify and speed up the process by not displaying unnecessary elements.
Use the Populate Single tool (Key-in CIVVIS POPULATE SINGLE)
and setup the Content: and Item: as desired for your 3D tree(s).
Key-in @D:\textfile.txt to use the text file as a script to data point at each coordinate in the text file.

The result will be a tree placed on the surface of the underlying existing 3D meshes at each coordinate.

Regards,
Ron

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Oto — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 11:00:08 GMT

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.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:56:23 GMT

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.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Max Voigt — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:40:49 GMT

This won't help him - specific mention of x,y co-ords in a 2D file.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Leonard Jones — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:26:15 GMT

How to place multiple cells (Trees) over a given area of a surface

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

John Davidson — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:22:36 GMT

Thanks for your help Leonard but it looks like the linked wiki has gone walkabout.

RE: How to place 3D trees on an existing mesh

Leonard Jones — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 10:11:26 GMT

Check the Populate Tool (Visualization > Utilities > Populate)

Please check this Wiki