Modeling Terrain with Archicad

[Anonymous]

Boy am I stumped...I'm new to Archicad (well actually I used it for awhile in 1993 then went off to now vectorworks....but I am interested in the absolutely many wonderful ways archicad has to work with buildings)....but the terrain modeling has really stopped my progress. I downloaded a document from digitalvis.com titled Modeling Terrain with ArchiCAD and followed the steps of using the magic wand to trace onto a mesh imported contours from a surveyor's and "lifting" the z axis of each node of each contour line only to be left with no 3D model of the terrain. I need help with this method or suggestions for another way to create a terrain model of a site with topographic challenges. I have the surveyor's topo file as dwg & I have the surveyor's crd, RW5, cr5, and asc files for this site. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I'm not familiar with the other file types you mention, but if you have XYZ coordinates in a text file ArchiCAD 14 has a function to create a site mesh from those.

The contour method is not too difficult though. Perhaps you should just try playing around with the mesh tool to get more familiar with it and then try the tutorial again.

There's also quite a bit on this topic in the forum. Perhaps a search would help.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the encouragement. A setting in 3D documents was set to transparent....changed that and....voila a 3D Site plan model. This has really boosted my confidence.