Contour Lines To 3D Mesh In Blender

i'd like to share a method i used for converting contour lines into a 3d mesh in blender now there are some tools like sketchup pro they can do this with a single click apparently but since i don't have sketchup pro i wanted to find a way to do this within blender but i have linked to the sketchup pro tutorial i found about this below now if anyone has a better way of doing this within blender or knows of a plugin that can help automate the process please let me know in the comments below the approach i took starts with the contour lines in 3d space and then i used two successive shrink wrapped planes to create an evenly spaced geometry over the tops of the curves for my starting point here i already have the contour lines apparently positioned at the right heights if you're starting from a 2d topological map you're going to need to trace out each of these contour lines and then set them to the appropriate height before you get started to start with we're going to add our planes that we're going to be using to wrap our contour lines so let's move into the top or graphic view and move our cursor to the center of where our contour lines are use shift a to bring up the add object menu and add a plane then use s to scale this up to cover the entire area of the contour lines we're also going to want to go to the side view and move this into alignment more or less with our contour lines to provide the best fit if you leave it down here out of the way sometimes some of the contour lines will get skipped if there's some of these that are further away from the two adjacent ones when it tries to do the projection so when you also rotate that into something like a best fit line there and i'm also going to go ahead and duplicate my plane so that i have the second one all ready to go when we do our second wrap so if i go to my first point i can go ahead and add our strength wrap modifier and i have to set the target to the top topo lines nothing happens yet which is because wrap method set to near surface but we don't have a surface yet so we're going to switch that to nearest vertex and at this point we see we've got the four corners because those are the only four vertices in the plane that could be fit so we need to subdivide our plane so let's go ahead and add the subdivision surface we'll use a simple one to keep the corners where they belong and then up our subdivision levels to nine which i founded in earlier experimentations to be a pretty good number to give us a good fit now initially when i did this i thought i had a pretty good solution and that was all done but when i went into the settings and turned on the face orientation display to see how good the topology was i noticed that i had a number of places where you get red which means we probably have some overlapping geometry or reversed i wasn't able to find a great way of cleaning that up with any other setting so my solution to that was do our second projection okay so let's go ahead and turn our second plane back on and we can hide the original plane um to have an evenly spaced grid of polygons in the x y plane i'm actually going to need to remove the rotation that i put on this plane earlier we can go alt r and i'm also going to move this just below the level of the contour line so that i'm just projecting everything up onto this new surface that we have so once again we need to add our subdivision modifier uh simple with nine levels of subdivision as we did before and then we can go ahead and add our shrink wrap modifier now this time we're going to set the top aligns we're going to use the plane we created as the target and then instead of using the nearest surface point we're just going to do a simple projection on along the z-axis and this should give us exactly what we want at this point if i go ahead and apply my modifiers here we can then go into the edit mode on let's go ahead and hide the topo lines and go into the edit mode on our new surface and we can see we have a very evenly spaced set of polygons all very ordered just projected straight onto it we turn our top of the lines back on we can see we actually have a pretty good fit and that was my method for converting to the contour lines into a 3d surface and there's one final step we can actually remove all this extra stuff along the sides by going into edit mode going to the side selecting all of these vertices down here at the bottom and hitting x delete vertices and then we're left with only oh my son all right then we're left with only our circles that we wanted and we've got our final mesh you

Channel: Vortex Basis

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Id: qOgzR5kNTMo

Length: 5min 39sec (339 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021