nestly Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 I have little to no experience with 3D terrains, but I'd like to be able to create a surface or mesh from contour lines to give a better 3D representation of terrain than just contour lines. "Drape" seems to be the tool ACA, but I'm wondering if AutoCAD can do something similar. LOFT sorta works, but even then, I have to do it in sections, and I'm not really looking for a solid. Contour test.dwg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cad64 Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 Maybe 2012 could do it, but in 2011 and earlier, I think you need a terrain mesh plug in like this one: http://www.sycode.com/products/terraincad_ac/index.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nestly Posted June 25, 2011 Author Share Posted June 25, 2011 Thanks Cad64, I had already tried a another terrain model app (albeit freeware) that claims to do similar.... all I got was error messages from that one. http://www.cadstudio.cz/en/apps/dtm/ I was really hoping for a solution using just AutoCAD. I lofted only the top 3 contours (making them a solid) then used CONVTOMESH. It took about a minute to turn it into a mesh, and the file size ballooned to 17.2 MB. If I did all the elevations in the little sample drawing I posted, I imagine the filesize would be completely untenable. I wonder if meshes are typically that large, or maybe the process I used is just that inefficient? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tzframpton Posted June 25, 2011 Share Posted June 25, 2011 Try the DRAPE command. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nestly Posted June 25, 2011 Author Share Posted June 25, 2011 Try the DRAPE command. Yeah, that was the first thing I tried, but I don't think that tool is available in vanilla AutoCAD. Unknown command "DRAPE". Press F1 for help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nestly Posted June 25, 2011 Author Share Posted June 25, 2011 (edited) Thanks JoeTony, I may have to download and try that. I really like the cross section tool, I currently spend way too much time manually creating sections. Edited June 27, 2011 by nestly Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nestly Posted June 27, 2011 Author Share Posted June 27, 2011 I installed the trial, and it works fairly well. So far I haven't been able to achieve the level of smoothness I was hoping for, but I'll continue to play with it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nestly Posted June 28, 2011 Author Share Posted June 28, 2011 I figured out that the 3D surface isn't really a surface, it's a bunch of flat faces in a block, so the transitions are necessarily sharp/abrupt. The polylines in my sample drawing are optimized because that's new construction, but when I did the whole site including all the existing contour polylines that have thousands of vertices each, the model gets pretty heavy to zoom/pan/orbit. Still, it's pretty cool software, but I'm hoping to find some clever user that wrote a lisp to create an actual surface from contours. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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