Placing a hollow object below terrain and water level

[EdBardet]

My project is to illustrate a boatyard. Included in the scene will be various objects. The important ones, for this question are a saw-pit, building ways, and a dry dock. All of these are hollow blocks ( think swimming pools) with objects within them, such as a man standing at the bottom of a saw-pit. I did a test object, in C4D, of a cube with a smaller cube subtracted from it. In the developing program I rendered a jpg (attached) that shows it actually has a bottom. The preview in TG3 also indicates a bottom. When I place this on a terrain and lower it partway both the terrain and the water enter the object. [You could say it is not waterproof!]

Is there some way I can make these hollow objects actually work. If not I'm going to have to use a really crummy terrain feature of C4D.

Thanx,
Ed

[cyphyr]

Not really sure what you're after with out the actual files (c4d's)
You'll need to punch holes in your terrain to place the objects in. You can do this with a simple black and white map of your area plugged into a displacement map set to a negative displacement.
One way to accurately line everything upis to do a render of your terrain with an ortho camera above the center of the area you're rendering. You can then edit the image to show your depressions where your structures and then re-project using the same camera.
Hope this helps
Richard

[Dune]

If it's just a few rectangles you might try some simple shapes as masks to lower ground level and water level locally. Copy location of object to simple shape and transform it's size. Should be no problem.

[Oshyan]

Terragen's water (lake) object and water shader does not perform any kind of physics or "fill" calculation, there is no collision detection. The Lake object is essentially a flat plane that can intersect (and so essentially go through) any object. It can however be masked as with most any other shader, so I'd suggest you use something like a Simple Shape Shader the same dimensions and position as your object as a mask for the water, and then you can prevent water from showing inside the hollow part of the object.

- Oshyan