Hello, thanks for pointing out to Connecter app - that is one nice asset browser, of course it is quite feature lacking especially in comparison to Project Manager - which is very, very good and at the same very lame looking especially when compared to Connecter which is way easier on the eyes plus imho the whole idea of running it as a separate app and running scripts only then interacting with max is so much cleaner and safer. Not to mention it's free ))
To make up for that find - here's the awesomeness which I recently found :
http://www.scriptspot.com/users/nik almost all of his scripts are awesome but especially those which have "
Uni" at their names - as simple their functionality might seem from a first glance as good they are for making life easier - they can be mapped to a quad menu or a hotkeys and can speedup your modelling process tremendously.
not sure if it wasn't posted already but -
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/mass-randomizer - imo it is probably one the best randomizers out there, in some regards it is far superior even to this one
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/random-master-1-0 which is quite good too.
and this
https://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/en/Detail/Index?id=appstore.exchange.autodesk.com%3A3ptalign%3Aen or
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/3-point-align awesomeness - I personally found that one just some month ago but it have been there for years and how much of my time would it save if I'd found it earlier !
Some months ago Cyrus3v asked obout terrain making\optimizing process - sorry I've missed the thread back then but here's the tools which in my experience are the best for the task:
1) if you are working with already done shitmesh (no better word to call it) as you posted
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4908.0;attach=25107;image then probably the allready mentioned
http://populate3d.com/products/terrain/ is your best choice - it will make nice and clean quad (mostly) geometry out of that and it will be far easier to work with. The only problem with it - if your survey\terrain is large and you need some more detailed features/areas/parts like some roads gradings, rivers, lakes etc - huge polycounts may be needed - sometimes really huge and thus manual optimization will be necessary - still it is the best choice in that case. Saddly plugin wasn't updated for max 2015 and later - though I really hope that it will not be forgotten.
2) if you're working with raw survey data - be it point or isoline type then this is the ULTIMATE (no kidding - just watch it's youtube tutorials) solution or at least so at this current time -
http://rendering.ru/ru_en/splineland.html - it's not free but it is worth every cent.
Anything you throw at it it will chew and make you an awesome highly detailed (where needed) and highly optimized (in some some flatter\less detailed areas) parametric object on which you can later add roads and their grading, some flat areas for planned buildings, rivers, lakes etc. and then convert it to polys if needed.
Splineland's terrain meshing solution is the best of all that I've seen, and I've seen plenty of those - even most of those which are used in dedicated survey\terrain\infrastracture\etc modelling applications aren't giving such results and in most cases will give results which are close to that that max's crappy/stupid/ugly/default/hate it :) terrain meshing solution can provide, which will all be more or less close to that "shitmesh" you've posted due to simillar shitty and presumably outdated algorhytm which most of them use.
Even in case when I get similar "shitmesh" to work with I first run it trough Populate Terrain to get a cleaner mesh and then using contour line generation by max's default Section (located in spline creation tab) tool feed those newly created isolines to Splineland for much easier and cleaner + more optimized results.
Not to mention that you can use different scale survey data parts to combine those into a single terrain with different detailing for let's say close\point of interest\building site and far one for some distant forest\fields\city\whatever, provided both those surveys are alligned properly and are sharing the same height system which of course can be adjusted manually. The only bad thing I can tell about Splineland (apart from some minor but tolerable bugs) it can take quite a lot of time to calculate some large and highly detailed terrain and it can chew quite large amounts of ram (seen even more than 32 gigs with one case) in the process but as I've wrote the result is totally worth it.
Hope that helps someone :)
PS: Sorry for such a long post but when I write about that wonderful plugin I just cannot stop especially considered some strange and totally uncalled for lack of attention from cg community - my verdict would be : it is one of the best, most useful and most complex yet easy to use plugins for 3ds max and possibly net only max ever !
