Terrain too complex for interpolator

Hi All

I'm using Home Designer Pro 2012 and have run into this error a couple of times now:

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

Last time I was able to jiggle the retaining walls around and get it working again without really understanding what the issue was, but this time I'm stuck. Is there some sort of complexity threshold I might legitimately be hitting or most likely a sign something is incorrect in my plan? I'm modelling about 7 acres of sloping terrain and have various contour lines, terrain areas, retaining walls and some actual measured elevation points in there - so there's a bit of work for the terrain generator to do. It's the first time I've seriously tried to use terrains though so I have no feel for the limitations or power of this feature. Maybe that should be a walk in the park for it!

Searching on the error message comes up blank - have others encountered it? Is there something that is commonly causing the problem - unfortunately the message doesn't much indication where to look for the issue - I changed a few elevations and retaining walls before trying to regenerate and now I can't seem to get it back to working.

Very frustrated as I'm in the final stages or preparing our council plans and for the most part Home Designer has served me really well, I'm very happy with what I've been able to produce with it. Any help to solve this one would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Mick

I've never seen that error message , might be best to send the .plan file to tech support so they can figure it out.

M.

Terrain modulation is probably the most difficult tool to master in this software. It is not intuitive and is best learned by observed trial and error manipulation, in small steps (making a change in elevation objects and then observing the resulting change in camera views per change.

Another tip is to keep it as simple as possible, by that I mean use as few elevation objects and modifiers as possible so as not to overwhelm your PC's ability to compute the terrain.

Make sure that your elevation objects do not cross into each others "space" (this causes some bazarro-world type results).

The terrain plane is designed to operate on a minimum of two differing datums (elevation values) between which the terrain will form a gradient between objects, the hard part is where you need abrupt height changes and there is a special tool for those instances called "Terrain Break".

I learned this tool by hours of intense trial and error changes, tweaking in the shape and modulation of the terrain to my needs and then placing the terrain plane as an object to the house model in terms of "Z" axis height by way of the "Building Pan" input box.

DJP