How to extract CONTOUR LINES from anywhere in the world!

[Music] hey what is going on everybody welcome back to our age tutorials today we're going to turn something like this into a nice topograph and this works with basically anywhere in the world if you don't have this information available from other sites so to begin it's really simple we just need to open up google earth pro i'll provide the download link in the description but this is a totally free program and we're just gonna go and google the place that we want to go to so for example um for this tutorial we're gonna do our buddhist bridge uh which is one of the places in my hometown that is a little bit uh hilly which will work out perfectly for this example so say we want to extract just a little bit of area here maybe these couple blocks and we want to take the topo from here in order to do a future project or something like that you can go up here to the add path which is right here and you can name this path uh whatever you really like so i'm gonna just name it arbutus ridge oh not our bust bridge our beautiful bridge and you can change the style and color but i'm just going to leave it uh you can simply ignore this table just make sure you don't close it before you draw the area so if i want this area here that you can see i basically outlined what i'm going to do is basically try to draw as many points along this path as possible now obviously the more path you have the more accurate this information will be [Music] and you want to do this the other side as well so make a nice waffle shape just make sure you don't click on the little red dots otherwise it'll manipulate it in a way that you don't really want to try to click in between the spaces and you don't have to be too precise about the other one coming horizontally just because you have all these data points already so go ahead and do this as well [Music] all right and now once we have everything completed we can go ahead here and just click ok on our new path and here it will show up on the left here under places so what we're going to do is right click on arbutus ridge and go ahead and save the place as a kml file so i'm going to go ahead and just save it on my desktop for ease of access but you can save it anywhere you really want all right so the next step is going into google and searching up gps visualizer and this is basically the first result that comes up which is the gps visualizer.com and we're gonna need to want to add elevation data into our kml file so we're gonna hit convert to gpx right here uh so for the upload file make sure we put in the kml file that we just extracted from google earth and then make sure down here where it says add dm elevation data you switch to either best available source or if you know that you want to use any of these you can uh just click on one of these but usually the best available source will actually says give you the best available information so i'm going to hit convert here and just wait for a little bit so it's going to say that it's been converted to a gpx which is perfect um and we're going to go ahead and just download this now after you've downloaded this we're going to move into the next step okay now that we have everything converted we're going to head into arcmaps if you guys don't have arcmaps there's a 21 day free trial that i'll put in the description otherwise you can also use qgis which i've never personally used but i've heard a lot of good things about it it is a free program compared to arc maps which is not so we're going to go ahead and just open uh blank map on arcmap and then go into our toolbox here it might look different on your screen but you can also access it up here in the toolbar and we're just going to go into the conversion tools so down here in the conversion tool we're going to scroll to from gps and then hit the gpx to features tab so i'm going to go ahead and select the arbutus ridge gpx so that depends on where you saved it from where we just converted on the website and we are going to just simply output it to default uh just give it a sec here yeah okay so we're gonna go ahead and output it to um a folder that i made and we're just gonna name this um features okay now we're just gonna hit okay and let arcmap do its thing all right so once we have all the data here we're gonna go into our spatial analysis tool and then down here at interpolation we're gonna use the idw tool which is the inverse distance weighted interpolation i believe so we're going to double click on that and then input is our features which is all these dots here and we're going to use the elevations z value field uh now you can also output the raster wherever you like but this is going to be an elevation app okay that's good so we're going to hit ok here and it's going to generate kind of like a heat map for elevation here for us now you can see that all the values are here but we don't quite have all the contours yet and that's where this last step comes in i'm going to go back into our tool toolbox and under the spatial analyst tools we are going to just use the surface analysis tool and under contours we're going to go in and hit our input raster as the elevation map which we just created and again we're going to rename this contour uh in our output features class and then we're gonna do interval of one meter so every meter it'll draw a line now you can see that the lowest is 20 and the highest is 50 so we'll have 25 contours now you can adjust this as you like maybe for a bigger site you want this to be a little bit higher we're just going to use uh one for now i'm going to keep all these the same and that should be good okay so we're going to hit ok and arc map will generate nice contours for us okay now that we have our contours there's two things that we can do that will help us a lot first one is uh to label each single contour and you can simply right click on the contours layer that we have and just click label features if you want to change that up you can hit properties and then in the labels tab you can change how you want it to show up and how big it is i'm going to turn this off to showcase the next one so if you want to highlight every five contours uh there is one way to do that and we're gonna open the attributes table so in this table uh since there's not that many contours i'm just gonna do this manually otherwise you would have to import a formula into the calculator but uh our most bottom our bottom most contour would be the 26 so we're going to select this and then hitting control we're just going to select every five contours so 26 uh next one's going to be 31 followed by 36 and 41 and then 46. i think that's it there's no repeats here yep looks good and we're going to go ahead and just add a new field so right here add field now you can name this anything you want i'm going to name it selection and we're just going to leave everything here as is so once we have all the selection uh we have the selection tab created we're gonna go ahead and right click and the field calculator and i'm just gonna type one so this is gonna belong to category one this is all the bold lines that we want to have and what we're gonna do is select the selection so we're gonna switch it and it's gonna select everything else and we're gonna do the same thing right click on selection go to field calculator and this is going to be selection number two now you'll see how this comes in handy in a bit but um for now i'm just gonna deselect everything by clearing the selection okay now we want to go into properties and in the display sorry symbology tab in the categories we're going to go ahead and add all values for the selections so we're going to switch over to selection add all the values here and now you can see that we can choose to change how it is displayed so for the bolder one which is r1 we can change it to a more bold black and for two uh we can just change it to something a little bit less in your face like this and already you can see that there's a big difference and you can obviously adjust this to uh whatever your preference is so right now it's kind of a little bit too thick here so we're gonna go ahead and change that to something like point three and yeah that's about it so you can basically label the features and turn this on and there you go you have our contours nice and ready to go if you want to export simply go to file and export the map into any of these formats and that's about it hope you guys enjoyed i hope you guys learned something if you did comment down in the section and then make sure you like and subscribe to the channel for more future content so i'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: LYH Studio

Views: 29,959

Rating: 4.9022222 out of 5

Keywords: google earth, maps, contour lines, extracting contour, arcGIS, global information, geography, topographic lines, topography lines, elevation, highlighted interval, base plan, site plan, site elevation, tutorial video, architecture student, landscape architecture, urban design, DEM, arcMAP, google earth pro, how to, easy, simple, fast, university, architecture and design, interpolation

Id: nvdZ0aGJsRM

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/getyerhandoffit]

This technique is great, you can also find more accurate contours for a lot of areas through their government spatial portals. All of the portals I’ve used in the past require at least an email to register but they’ve all been free. You can get a variety of export formats, the most useful for CAD is probably shapefiles if dwg/dxf aren’t available.

There’s also the wonderful free QGIS software if you’ve got time to learn it. Incredibly useful for larger scale projects, and a heap of fun to use.

[u/NARVO90]

This is a killer way to get topo, thanks for sharing!

[u/selfsearched]

So useful!

[u/fatesjester]

Google Maps/Earth tends to build their topo from at best 20m contour intervals - so of course its going to be pretty coarse-grained in its resolution. When you're generating higher resolution contours than that you're just making up data via arcGIS.

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Useful for incredibly basic concept designing but not much more than this.

[u/KillroysGhost]

Any solution for taking this data and exporting it into Rhino either as linework or surface?