drawing landscape contours

[Ash Mair]

I was just wondering if anybody knows the best way to draw 3D landscape contours. I need to draw a 3D landscape and any help would be apreciated. Thanks in advance.

[CADTutor]

The way you approach this depends upon what software you have available and exactly what you want to do. Although you can easily draw 3D contours in AutoCAD using polylines and a given height, generating a surface is no easy without additional software. Depending on what you want you can use an AutoCAD add-on like Land Development Desktop or Key Terra-Firma. See this tutorial for details: http://www.cadtutor.net/acad/ktf/ground/ground.html This is good if you want to do cut/fill analysis etc.

Alternatively, if you are mostly interested in visualization, the best option is to take your AutoCAD contours into VIZ and create a terrain object. See this tutorial for details: http://www.cadtutor.net/dd/studio/terrain/terrain.html

[Mr T]

if you have a small site you can draw 3DPloylines, in the Pull down draw menu, using x,y & z co-ordinates.

Use relative or absolute coords.

Nick

Design & Technology Teacher,
Grangemouth High,
Scotland.
www.autocadzone.com

[ash mair]

Thanks for your reply Cad tutor and mr T but I need to draw an actual 3d surface, not just the contour lines but thankyou anyway. As for Terra Firma, can I get it for free anywhere?

[CADTutor]

Sadly, Terra-Firma is not available as a free demo but you can see their web site here http://www.keyterra-firma.com/

There are other terrain modeling add-ons for AutoCAD around but as far as I am aware, none of them are available as demos.