Mesh over site plan

[Tom Krowka]

Need to create a site mesh on a plan that has quite a bit a vertical of change on a five acre piece of property. What is the most effiecient way to do this. Am not interested in purchasing Architerra.

[Anonymous]

make a mesh of the boundary shape

then space click the contour lines with the mesh tool on
hit "fit to user ridges" each time the dialog box come up as you do this

then with the mesh selected click each of the contour lines and change the Z values to suit (tick the "apply to all " box each time)

then set the heights for the corners to suit.

[Anonymous]

theres a detailed how to here under "tips and tricks"

u might need to redgister on the site to view it tho

http://archicadselect.com/

[Tom Krowka]

Would that be "quick tip 2006#2, Stamping meshes". That seems to be the only one I can find that relates at all to this process.
Tried your short method.....doesn't seem to work quite the same. Do the contour lines have to be contained within the mesh boundary?

[Thomas Holm]

http://www.archicadwiki.com/TechNotes/Handle%20huge%20surveyors%27%20drawings?highlight=%28CategoryJ...

[Karl Ottenstein]

GeNOS wrote:
make a mesh of the boundary shape

then space click the contour lines with the mesh tool on

Tom,

I have yet to encounter a survey dwg in the US (Tom's question) that allows magic wanding of the contours because of (1) the major contours are not continuous - breaks for in-line elevation annotation and (2) the contours have way too many points, and magic wanding adds all of that unnecessary data to the mesh, adding too many polygons.

In my experience, tracing over the contours (snapping at reasonable points) is fastest and gives the 'fastest' (low polygon) mesh. I'd trace pretty precisely and include minor contours at the actual building site in your 5 acre parcel - and do just major contours and somewhat looser contour hugging for the rest of the lot.

Generally, I trace over with polylines and then magic wand them (again, because I have yet to receive continous surveyor contours).

Sounds like in the lands down under they get better files than I've seen here... 😉

Karl

PS The article that Thomas links to is useful for magic wand settings, etc.

[Karl Ottenstein]

I see Roberto's Italian survey had continuous contour lines as well... so I'm posting what I have found to be typical, at least in the mountain west of the US. Notice that the major contours (red) are broken to display the elevation text inline. This is not a masking thing. There really is no line there - so you have to recreate a continuous contour that spans the text to get the mesh ridge entered properly.

Is this what other people in the US see as well? I've assumed this is how all US Civils are trained...but maybe it is a local thing...

Cheers,
Karl

[vfrontiers]

Same here Karl.... It's a bummer to have to FILL IN these little lines.

[Anonymous]

Hello Karl,
This is what I have seen here in the Northeast.
I understand that many surveyors use the same
cad application to produce their site survey drawings
as a DXF or a DWG file.
I don't remember if the last hand drawn survey I saw
used this convention but I have seen survey drawings
done by architects that had no break in the contour line
and the elevation text was only at the ends of the contour line.
Peter Devlin

[Dwight]

The key is that the Archicad operator must, as Karl observes, cleverly build the mesh from extrapolated contours to minimize polygons in unimportant areas and carefully place nodes in critical areas to best model the true slope.

A blind reliance on tracing the contour plan guarantees an excessively high polygon count and creation of artificial horizontality in a situation that does not possess it.