3 Ways to Model Topography in Rhino and Manipulate!

[Music] hello everyone welcome to how to make topography in rhino in this tutorial we will go over how to make topography using topo lines and a really neat way that you can edit your topography really easily towards the end of the video so please stay tuned for that tip of this tutorial so without further ado let's hop into rhino and this video this tutorial is assuming that you already have a you already have the topographic information okay so let's open up this file i have a topo site here and yeah so this is my base map information and if i were to try to make a surface out of these lines it might crash your computer and it will also just be hard to navigate so the first thing that we're going to do is go over to layers and create a new layer called trimmed topo and then in addition we're just going to make another a default layer that we can we can use and then we're gonna select the topography which if you haven't already make sure that it's in a group just to make this easier and then do control c control v now you've copied and pasted that information you can come back into layers and only select one of those groups and then hit this layer button and go and put it on the trimmed layer the trimmed layer so layers are a little bit strange in rhino it takes a little bit you use getting used to but once you select an object you'll see if you have this object's properties selected then you can essentially move it to whatever layer you want and when you select that layer you're actually moving it to that layer that's how you change the layers of an object okay so now that we have that topo i'm going to just turn everything off for a second then turn on the trimmed and turn on the topo just to really make sure that you have two separate layers with the topo information all right so and then we're going to go back to this select this check mark means you're on that layer and you're going to create a rectangle and really only create it for what you what you need uh try to do as little as possible because it's it's just going to take a lot of information to make a surface out of this then what we're going to do is we're going to trim this topography information and now you know why we wanted to save that in the first place so go ahead and trim this trim trim trim trim trim trim trim trim trim and then you want to get to a point where you don't have any outlining lines to just make sure it's really clean and you also want to make sure you've now ungrouped this so i'm going to hit ungroup so it's just separate lines and you can regroup that if you want up to you and then just cleaning up all this extra line work and then if you have things that haven't been trimmed yet now that you're closer up you can go right right click sorry that's left click you left click and drag from the down to the top and that way anything that is selected a little bit will trim trim that up real nice so yeah this is basically how we do it okay so select this work and i'm just gonna finish cleaning all this up make it really nice and clean okay so even stuff like this like yeah let's clean this up because it's going to be annoying to deal with if you have that just hanging out there then you're going to select oh we still have this stuff so let's just clean that up make it nice and clean and i'm going to select all my line work and then i'm going to select this outer rectangle control and deselect the rectangle and then i'm going to type in patch and you'll see here u spans v spans 25 25. if your computer is not very fast you can lower this down to 10 but essentially what these spans do is it's going to give you the resolution the accuracy and so if you want a really really accurate surface you would bump this up to 100 but then again it might crash your computer if you did that so sometimes i'll just do 50 or 25 and check if it's accurate enough and if it is i'll just move on and it's fine don't worry about the automatic trim and adjust tangency we're going to trim it afterwards and let's hit okay okay so now we have this rectangle and we're going to use that rectangle we're going to do ctrl t and we're going to trim that surface that it made so that's what the patch does it takes these series of curves and basically averages them out to make your topography and you'll notice there are some errors like for instance i'm getting these crazy bumps here that's maybe a case where i would then go back and and redo this patch so and kind of take a look at why would it be doing that why is it creating those those and it's essentially because there's quite a bit of variation here uh so i might just come back and and clean this up a little bit for instance just getting rid of some of these smaller circles and any kind of bits of information that are just making a little bit too complicated and then let's just try that one more time and do patch and might as well go up higher because it didn't seem to have posh issues processing that make sure you save before you press ok because sometimes it will go into the nebulous uh just scrolling scrolling scrolling sometimes if you're patient with it it's fine and then you'll see now okay it's it's doing a little bit a better job of averaging that out and at the end of the day just consider okay what is really important that you actually need uh the information that you need so sometimes i'll come back in here and i'll hit this rectangle and i'll go ctrl shift and then make this smaller and then trim the surface and that way i'm making sure that my surfaces has nice and clean edges another thing that i should know is with this layers it would be good to get everything as a group or at least on a layer so that um you can control these topos on and off would be important and so for instance i would now want to make this surface onto a new layer and we'll call this surface and add that to that add it to that layer so let's try one last thing here um surface before we get into the contour and i did want to show the the adjacency or the the trimmed surface so if i make the rectangle a little bit bigger now i hit patch i'm going to adjust the trim here probably make this a little bit lower resolution so we don't have to wait around as long let's see if it's able to process this sometimes it doesn't process this so well because essentially you have this rectangle that you drew and that's at a certain z height and then you'll have points over here that are really low and points over here that are really high and it's trying to adjust for all that information and so that's kind of why it's freaking out so i'm going gonna hit escape because that's not even working at all and let's just do like 10 like really make it really simple automatic trim and see if it's able to even process that there are options like the stiffness for instance um so you can see how it averages out between the the top point and the bottom point and then it has to kind of over compensate but it trimmed that surface to this area so that's that's essentially why i like to actually just select my topography lines hit patch again you can adjust the stiffness but right now uh one would be fine and just let it expand out because then it averages out and you'll it's going crazy and essentially one of the reasons why it's doing that is because i did so few spans so i'll hit patch again let's just go back to 50 that seemed to be like a nice number to use and we'll use 50. and it's going to load a little bit and then once i have created that i am going to select that surface and then go to the properties and then go and change it to the surface layer so make sure that it's on a separate layer and then we're going to contour that that information in a couple of different ways once this is done loading sometimes you just have to be a patient maybe go out and get a cup of coffee or something okay so let's let's trim this up i go select the rectangle do ctrl t and now i'm going to select my surface and i'm going to come down here and turn it onto the surface layer and now i just i'm maintaining control of my layers a lot of you can waste a lot of times with trying to select information so if you find yourself spending like 20 minutes trying to select a bunch of lines that's a waste of time you need to make sure that you put that line work on a specific layer so that you can turn everything off and select that information really quickly so i'm going to select my surface and then i'm going to hit this the the circle button on here no if i move it i'm just going to move it but i want to select this circle it highlights black and then just extruded downwards and you'll notice that it's all bumpy on the bottom and so to trim that up and make it nice and clean i'm going to select this and i'll do select and view and then again go and hit the rectangle tool and then hit ctrl t scroll from the bottom to the top hit ok delete that rectangle and now you should have this and you'll notice okay it's not solid let's type in cap and then make that solid so now you have your solid uh your solid surface you could bring this to the cnc get a piece of foam and cnc cut this out let's say you don't have a cnc machine and you want to laser cut this uh what you would do would you would use the word the contour so i typed in contour select the base layer and then you want to just snap it to the z you do not want to make you do not want to be going in other directions you want to be making sure that you're going upwards and then for this exercise let's just do 10 feet so go 10 feet typically what i would do is i would contour it by the thickness of the material to scale so for instance if my chipboard is eighth of an inch thick and i'm working in 1 8 of an inch equals a foot what's my contour going to be it's going to be one foot contours so in that case if i'm going to say my sight model is going to be eighth of an inch i'm going to do the same thing press enter oh i had 10 feet so type in contour graphic scale i don't know why i did that contour select objects hit enter select base point select direction and then i'm going to do one foot and now it's going to take quite a while uh so you could see if you made this out of chipboard uh and your material is only eighth of an inch uh you have a lot of layers to laser cut and make into a model probably too many and so then you would say well maybe i need thicker material and then maybe you maybe make half an inch and you cut those contours out on the cnc machine all right so that's how you contour and and before you select anything when you just still have all these contours open go ahead make a new layer and and type in contour and then go properties layer oh i didn't contour contour now it's on the contour layer now when i go to layers i i just i want to really make sure that i have control over my layers and it's just really going to save you a lot of time all right cool so now i have my contours uh pretty fun and you could take those and lay those out and and laser cut them we're going to turn those contours off go back to our surface and then contour in the other direction if we wanted a series of planes so contour i'm going to contour in this direction and let's do 10 feet this time so it's a little bit less so this could be another option you could take a series of planes uh and contour them in this direction maybe make some dowels make a really nice model that way i'm just going to move this to the side because i don't want to deal with this information so you have this series of planes i could select these curves and type in planar surface did not like that you should be able to make this into it's not wanting to make those into planes so what i would do instead of doing the planar surface i could select all these curves come up to top view and then x type in extrude curve just say yes right now not really something we need to fret about uh and then do what was it 10 feet now let's go back to this and now i have a series of these undulating these undulating curves pretty cool i mean that just looks cool um you know you could do ghosted you could do technical you could actually make a really nice a really nice topography this way that would be a cool cool screenshot that we could then bring into photoshop and do some some cool stuff with so and you could also contour in the other direction and create a series of planes okay so let's just hide all that information for right now and now we're going to get into the special tip which is a really cool technique to be able to adjust topography easily which is really cool i actually didn't use this for a long time and and just recently um realized it could do this so do the same thing we're going to contour and let's do five feet let's let's let's go a little bit in the middle there so it doesn't take too too long but we still get some uh accuracy there now i'm going to hit i'm going to just not select out of it i want to keep the selection and i'm going to hit record history and now i'm going to extrude curve go into the vertical direction and type in 5 feet okay so i have other videos on record history please check those out but what's really cool about this is instead of trying to select the poly surface you select the line itself and the record history essentially makes it sticky to that line work and now you can really actually quite easily start manipulating this topography in a way that you would want and let's say i wanted to make like a little space out of this area for instance like make this whole uh different you know i could start to push that back um and then yeah so that's just a really cool way that you could manipulate topography so let's do show so we can show these various techniques of of and let's do the last one too of let's take this this poly surface ctrl v move it over here and let's so we did it in this direction and we did upwards let's do it in this direction so i'm going to take this and hit contour again hit this base point specify the direction five let's do 10 feet now it's gonna contour that whole entire oh i oh no i don't need to do that i was gonna say i almost forgot to do record history but i first have to contour it and then hit record history so now i'm going to hit record history extrude curve and i'm going to what this is saying is sometimes you don't get a complete closed circle and that way it's going to say it's self-intersecting and for right now just we don't really need to worry about it we're going to specify the direction and then what do we say 10 feet and then you can see like there is a difference between these various modes like this is clearly represented differently uh you get a different sense for the topography and so that's part of the reason why you would be modeling this and so now because i record a history for instance i could come in here and start manipulating these curves and i would say right now there there's these curves have a lot of points to them and there would be a way to go back and simplify or rebuild those curves but for right now you know just work with selecting a lot of points i guess uh and then but it really allows you to start manipulating and you could in various different aspects start to manipulate the topography very easily to create spatial experiences and that's what's really cool about this is you're not thinking of topography as this thing that you're just handed to but you're thinking about it in terms of how can i shape this as an additional surface that is part of my architecture so you could think of it topography as another facade or spatial experience similar to constructing a wall or constructing a roof you're also constructing the topography we think of topography as as this sort of natural element um but in fact a lot of topography has most topography has been manipulated by people so thank you so much for for joining and uh please stay tuned for some more tutorials on topography specifically the best way to bring in topography into rhino cool thanks for listening have a good day you

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Keywords: architecture, hana architecture, landscape architecture, spatial database architecture, gis system architecture and components, hana architecture and components in sap, gis examples, architectural patterns and practices, gis database management, gis components, web gis concept, gis, sketchnotes, philip heede, educational content, geographic information system (industry), arcgis online, system, esri uc tech sessions, database management system in hindi notes

Id: -uNKflvvWPo

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021