[kami]

It's me once again, with a question concerning a height model ...


what i want to achieve is a stepped terrain model. the way i proceed is closing all open height lines (i certainly can't avoid that work)
but the next step is to draw a frame for every line to get a closed line which I can extrude to get my stacked model. I then have to move every line to its correct height.
is there any way I can speed up this process?
I hope you could understand my description... my english is a bit to poor for such complicated stuff

thank you,
kami

[kami]

hmm... another question:
is it possible to simplify those height curves? if I extrude them, the objects get too complicated. file size goes up to a few 100MB and the viewport gets extremely slow.

[JDHill]

Not sure if it would work on those particular curves, since it really depends on how they're defined, but SimplfyCrv might help. Either way, it sounds like alot of work - is this something you need to do often? If so, maybe this plugin would be the way to go:

http://www.rhinoterrain.com/page405-392-input-data.html

I haven't tried it, and it looks a little spendy, but maybe it would be worthwhile to check into it.

[jespi]

hi kami, i do not thing you need to close those curves. if i were you, first i would save a lot of namedcplanes based on the height you need between each cut, i mean +0.0, +0.5, +1.0, +1.5,......them select each group of curves based on the different height they have and proyect each group to its realtive cplane using the proyect to cplane command. after that select all your curves and use the patch command, play with u,v spands to add preccision to the terrain. now go to curve-curve from object-contour and select the patch you've created, change to front view to define the direction of the cutting planes and define distance between cuts(same as distance between namedcplanes) and make sure you select the option join curves by cutting plane. now you have a very clean curves and lots of them are closed ones and a few ones will be open curves, so now you need to close those curves(it will be a lot easier than closing all the curve you have in the initial drawing), when you finish select all curves and extrude using the same distance(-0.5 in my example), make sure you selct the cap option. This is the method i used when i need to do that task, lots of times...

hope that makes sense,

josé

[kami]

sorry for the late response. I've been a bit busy. (mainly because I was modelling this terrain )

SimplfyCrv didn't help much, but I ended up not simplifying them, which makes the viewport a bit slow, but it's still ok to work with.
that rhinoterrain-plugin looks very nice, but it is way to expensive, if I only need it once or twice a year.

I've tried _patch on some terrains in the past and never got it working the way I want. So I usually stick to a cardboard-style stepped terrain. with curves of +0.5 it looks quite nice on a larger scale.

In the end I really ended up, manually connecting the not-closed curves (sometimes it wasn't easy to guess which curves belonged together). But it took me a bit less than one day for the whole model, so i'm still in my time budget. I'll post some results later on.

thanks,
kami