composing a landscape

[Anonymous]

hi there,
iam currently working on composing a landscape as part of a university project. The parcel of land in question slopes pretty steeply down to a beach. At the minute iam trying to follow the contuors on a ordnance survey map and building a layer of meshes-one on top of the other, entering the elevation values on the OS map.
However, the finished result looks very sharp and clunky, (despite the fact ive set user edges to smooth) and looks more like a series of terraces than the side of a hill, which in real life the slope is much smoother. is there anything i can do to achive a better result, is it a matter of playing with something in the mesh settings or simply putting in more meshes to fill the gaps, even so i think the edges will continue to look sharp and unnatural,
iam a real beginner when it comes to archicad and in fact any digital modelling so any help at all would be greatly appreciated,
thanks

[Eduardo Rolon]

If you are stacking meshes then you are doing it wrong. The concept is drawing one mesh, subdividing the mesh into the contours and then assigning the height values to each contour.

Procedure:

1) With the mesh tool selected draw the boundary of the site.
2) select the mesh and right click to select the "select and activate" command
3) pressing the spacebar (Magic Wand) click on the first contour.
4) From the pop up select fit contour to mesh (or something like it)
5) repeat as needed
6) after creating all contours, click on one of the nodes from one of the "new" contours that you created, the flyout will show and look for the icon with a small "Z" and click on it. AC will ask for the height of the node, input the info and select apply to all. When clicking on the nodes DO NOT click on the nodes from the contour that touch the boundary.
7) repeat as necessary