Hi everyone. Some of you may have read a previous thread of mine http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=42645 where I wish to create a large accurate topographic surface from contour lines imported from CAD. I'd tried all the suggestions in that thread and it was a great learning experience, however I didn't quite get to my ultimate solution there.
I now have a workflow that creates what I require, but it is labour intensive and slow. I've posted the attached sketchup file, not only as a plea for more help, but I also hope this may be of assistance to others working with CAD contours. This is just a small section of the model that I actually want to produce. I've saved my workflow as series of scenes - I'd really appreciate it if you folks could scan through it and see if there is a way to improve this. In particular - in scene 2 you'll see that I select a contour segment, expand the selection to 'all connected', weld this to a single curve before adding equally spaced guide points along the curve. At the moment I have to do this for each contour individually.
It's also worth noting that I've tried thomthoms edge tools>simplify, but with my data this still yielded contours that either crossed over too much using a wide tolerance or were too complex to efficiently create a surface from when using a tighter tolerance.
thanks in advance
- Mick
topography from CAD contours.skp