Landscaping from points

[gookeeper]

does anyone know how do i create a Landscape in max or autocad from these height points.

 

I can't get hold of any contour layouts

 

Cheers

 

Guy

[oluv]

are the points already at their z-positions, or are they all flat?

if they are flat, then they are hopefully blocks with height-attribute. if this is the case, you can use acad's attribute-extraction tool to export the blocks' x,y insertion points and their height-attribute to a csv-file. then check the file in excel if there are missing or corrupt heights for any of the points (only numbers are allowed, fields like "h=167" or similar will cause problems). after having checked everything, you have to import the points back to autocad, there are various lisp-routines for that, or you make it simply like this:

check that your point list only has 3 rows, namely: x,y,z

it should look like this:

4545.32,2232.91,194.1

4532.76,2245.12,190.4

3123.75,4321.15,191.3

etc

 

now add this as the very first line to your list:

_.multiple point

 

and save it as "points.scr"

 

you can drag this script into your autcad window and it should import all the points from your list at their right positions..

 

you will still need some tool to triangulate between them. you cannot do this in autocad, you need other tools for that, a cheap and nice one is ezysurf:

http://www.ezysurf.com/

i think it even brings some own point-importer...

 

otherwise you can send me the point file and i will triangulate it for you.

 

but don't forget that you will only get a very rough surface only from points. if your terrain has sharp boundaries, slopes etc, you will need additional breakline-data for a clean terrain.

 

i hope this helps a bit.

[William Alexander]

LOL, nice guys giving you piont data from a survey, hehehe they want a topology chart too?

 

It's going to be one ugly looking mesh based on those points...imho. Oluv is right about adding more points.

 

You might want to try connecting the dots with poly lines....civil engineering... create topology lines at regular intervals of elevation based on the elevation of the points. Seeing the points aren't at regular elevations you can't actually connect the dots but kind of average the distance between similar elevations that your poline line is being drawn on. For vert placement of the polylines

 

Then get the dwg polyline file into max and use the terrian tool to create your mesh.

 

Hope that made some sense and can be helpful...

WDA

[oluv]

LOL, nice guys giving you piont data from a survey, hehehe they want a topology chart too?

 

i don't understand your comment. i only wanted to be helpful, so what is the problem?

[bully712]

I think he was commenting on the file that "Guy" received to build a topo.

[William Alexander]

i don't understand your comment. i only wanted to be helpful, so what is the problem?

 

oluv,

 

Was not meant to be directed to you in anyway....apologies

 

It was meant to be sarcastic humor about being given challeging projects, when typically one would like to have accurate and readily usable data...in the form of a topology map prepared by a surveyer/civil engineer, rather than a point survey used to generate one LOL

 

Beyond that I agree with your methods and was offering another possibility!

 

Cheers

WDA

[oluv]

sorry wda, it seems i missunderstood it!

 

but while talking about civil-engineering now:

does anyone of you know any affordable software-package which is easy to use for terrain editing? i mean building pads and pools and stuff into an existing terrain-mesh. i have tried the demo of easysite for rhino (i prefer rhino over acad for 3d-work), but easysite crashes quite often on more complex tasks and is not fully reliable, although i like their approach, because it is very easy to use and nicely integrated into rhino.

 

sketchup's sandbox-tools are useless on large models, although the idea would be nice if it worked.

 

i also played around with leveller from daylon graphics, but it isn't a serious tool either, although painting around in the terrain is quite a cool approach, but it is not accurate, and import/export is quite clumsy as the meshes have to be transformed into a grid-type surface first and you cannot import any lines as reference etc.

 

maybe you know any application which could suit my task. nothing tooooo technical but with some serious editing capabilities.