I'm a member of the DDSS group at the Eindhoven University of Technology and we are researching whether MX would be a viable product to use for generating roads for use in real-time 3D models. The municipality of Amsterdam have shown us how they use the software and provided us with some test models. Their approach is to create an input file and convert that to a mesh by using Analysis->Triangle->Triangulation from a String model. However, this approach creates models with a lot of polygons (ca. 300,000 for a short section of highway), which is less than ideal for real-time use. With this method, there appears to be no way to influence the detail level of the resulting mesh.
I would therfore like to ask if there is anything I have overlooked, whether there is an alternative way to generate the mesh that does allow control over the resulting number of polygons (ideally about an order of magnitude less) or whether this is not yet possible in MX.
The triangles are created from the strings used to design the road. In a simple case, you would have the centreline and the left and right edges. When creating the centreline initially, the designer would give a chainage interval for points on the Master string (i.e. the horizontal alignment). This is normally 10m. All the points are then used in the triangulation. There is not a method for reducing the number of points used. The designer would have to create the alignment with points further apart, but that would lose accuracy.
I have a section of road 510m long, and the triangulation of this road contains 7800 triangles - I am intrigued to know your definition of a 'short section of road' - my road would need to be 18000m long to get near 300000 triangles :-)
@Mark Marnell sir, I was new to MX roads....and as a part of our project we need to do triangulation for two roads....can you say a step by step procedure to do that ......that would be a great help for us....and we are using
MX_08.11.09493-ind version