Adding a terrain - InfraWorks Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay, just as a precaution let's save our project one more time and let's talk about terrains. So we're looking around our model here, this is not a terrain, this is a mesh. This is part of an FBX that has been brought into this scene graph. So that's something that you have to remember. In order to have a terrain that you can model or sculpt or do anything like that, what we need to do is we need to add it. Now again I'm just going to grab my middle most button holding down the Control key, and I'm looking underneath my FBX model. So do you see this weird kind of paving here? That is the starting ground, if I click on it, you see it's there. We've moved it up to 225, that's the starting ground. Now, even though it's the starting ground you can't do anything to it. You can't dig into it, you can't make anything change about it, you might be able to put another material on it but it isn't manipulatable. Is that a word? Anyway, I've used it. You can't manipulate it. So what we're going to do is we are going to add a terrain to this scene so that we can start playing around with the ground within our model. So I'm going to zoom out, there we go. So I'm going to zoom out to the starting ground, I'm going to hit Escape so that nothing is selected, and we're going to add a terrain to the scene graph. To add a terrain, head over to the left-hand side and hit this little triangle, it's going to bring up a material library. Now what we want is we want vegetation and landscape, so double-click, we want landscapes and know there is two that we can have, we can either have a flat landscape or we can have rocky grasslands. We're just going to use the flat landscape, click on it using your left mouse button and just drag it into your scene window. It's going to prepare the terrain and it's going to stick it way down at the original spot again, so annoying, but you can see that within our hierarchy, right at the bottom, so let's squish that up. So we've got the starting ground, we've got our development FBX, which is over here, and then we have the flat landscape. Now this is what is selected at the moment. So what we want to do is we want to move that up to, what did we do the other one, was it 225? Let's move this to 226 and hit Enter. So there that flat grassland is something that we can actually sculpt and paint. So that means that we can dig into it, we can create holes, we can create mountains, we can erode things, we can paint vegetation on the terrain, we can put in trees, all that type of thing. Now notice that it just looks like a big green blob right now. However, if we say, just click on one of the parts of the FBX, we zoom to selection and we use our mouse and keys to zoom in. This is what I was talking about. When we talk about grass fade in and grass fade out. So the closer we get to this the more detailed the grass will get. Now we're only on medium visualization and we set the grass fade out to medium as well. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about those particular settings options. Now this is still a little bit below the FBX. But the thing is we can dig into it and we can start to change it for want of a better word. In fact, I'm going to select it, I've selected it you see over here it's selected, and I'm going to change it up to maybe 229. So let's zoom around and let's go to our pond, zoom to selection. And now what we're going to do is we're going to start playing around with this terrain. If I use my middle mouse button without using the Shift key, I can move around my scene, my model. And notice here we have our FBX and this is our flat terrain. So at some points within the FBX it's lower than 229 meters, but we're not going to worry about that right now, because what we want to do is we want to sculpt the terrain up. So let's just hit Escape to make sure nothing is selected and zoom around to see our pond.