Terrain interpolation broken due to complexity

[michaelf]

I have an error showing up when terrain is built, and the terrain is completely wrong:

 

"The terrain interpolator is ignoring terrain breaks and retaining walls due to the complexity of the calculation."

 

Indeed the terrain generated by Home Designer Architect shows a lot of issues, including producing nonsense terrain in areas which were working fine before I worked on the terraces themselves in the plan view. Just some examples:

• Huge curves on the first terraces just to the right of the house in the plan. The retaining walls are supposed to be 1300mm high, and the terraces slope up gently to the higher elevation and the next retaining wall.
• Several retaining wall corners show dirt 'spilling over' onto the terrace below.
• Many retaining wall foundations are visible.
• The retaining wall at the end of the patio area next to the first lot of terraces has completely disappeared, with the interpolated elevation going over 1000mm below the lowest of the adjacent point and adjacent line.

 

The terrain is supposed to be a series of gently sloped or flat terraces leading up to the right from the concrete pad. I've found that if I don't have the flat elevation regions going right up to the retaining walls, I get even more bizarre behaviour.

 

Does anybody have any suggestions to get around this problem, please? I cannot find any KB articles about how to deal with this issue, what the limit of complexity is and why it exists, which specific lines/areas/points/walls are causing the problem, and best practice for specifying terrain.

 

Thank you,

 

Michael

2018_12_Existing_Broken_Terrain.zip

[michaelf]

Ah, I found the issue - an area where a retaining wall went perpendicularly into the side of an elevation region. That seems to have fixed most of the issues up - but not the foundations showing, does anyone know how to fix that?

[Jo_Ann]

Terrains can be very tricky and frustrating, and there isn't a lot of helpful info about them, but maybe these suggestions will help:

2D Display, turn OFF > Dimensions-Automatic;  Plants;  Secondary Contours.
3D Display, turn OFF> Plants.
Now that you can SEE what you're doing, hold down Ctrl key and select every terrain flat elevation region.  Open the dialog box and choose a solid fill color (make it highly transparent). This makes elevation types easier to see.  Zoom in and start moving things while observing the 3D response in a tiled window.

To avoid seeing the foundation footing, open the wall and remove the footing.

If you had done a forum search about terrains, you would see that it is usually recommended to never use elevation points (you have used some elevation points).

What's with those stairs on the terrain?  Their position makes no sense.

 

 

[DavidJPotter]

Part of learning to use this software is learning what it can and cannot do, what works well and what to avoid. Retaining walls is a buggy tool which I avoid using a lot, as a substitute I prefer slabs as they are easier to work with and do not interact with terrain (they stay where and as you place them with no interaction with terrain). Hope this helps.

 

DJP

[michaelf]

On 12/24/2018 at 11:38 AM, Jo_Ann said:

Terrains can be very tricky and frustrating, and there isn't a lot of helpful info about them, but maybe these suggestions will help:

2D Display, turn OFF > Dimensions-Automatic;  Plants;  Secondary Contours.
3D Display, turn OFF> Plants.
Now that you can SEE what you're doing, hold down Ctrl key and select every terrain flat elevation region.  Open the dialog box and choose a solid fill color (make it highly transparent). This makes elevation types easier to see.  Zoom in and start moving things while observing the 3D response in a tiled window.

To avoid seeing the foundation footing, open the wall and remove the footing.

If you had done a forum search about terrains, you would see that it is usually recommended to never use elevation points (you have used some elevation points).

What's with those stairs on the terrain?  Their position makes no sense.

 

 

Thank you, Jo_Ann.

 

In the end I found that a retaining wall was just penetrating into one of the elevation areas, and when I removed that most of the problems went away.

 

I took up your helpful suggestions about turning off the contours and footings, thank you. I did remove the elevation points and it does help too.

 

The stairs I have more or less sorted out, using decks which connect the different stairs but which seem to provide an elevation reference for them to go between.

 

Thank you,

 

Michael

[michaelf]

On 12/24/2018 at 3:38 PM, DavidJPotter said:

Part of learning to use this software is learning what it can and cannot do, what works well and what to avoid. Retaining walls is a buggy tool which I avoid using a lot, as a substitute I prefer slabs as they are easier to work with and do not interact with terrain (they stay where and as you place them with no interaction with terrain). Hope this helps.

 

Thank you, David, I will look into slabs some more. As I mentioned in my reply to Jo_Ann above, I got the retaining walls working mostly okay and many are sloped so I think a slap won't work for that case. I find that when the elevations either side of the wall are okay, in all but one case retaining walls seem to work. The case it doesn't work is where I want a retaining wall to split and rejoin itself, creating an intermediate terrace in one part of it. Could be a good candidate for slabs!