How to transform Contours into a Rhino Surface

okay so when you have your contours successfully imported into Rhino open grasshopper and again this is how to take these contours and turn it into a nice clean surface open grasshopper if you don't don't want to use grasshopper this is actually a great way to learn how to use grasshoppers to make surfaces out of contours let me just move this thing out of the way we don't need to look at that so in Rhino before I do anything in grasshopper I'm going to make a layer called bounding box and set that bonding box even my current layer and then I'm going to go to a top view of the area that we want to turn it to a surface and we're gonna draw a box within the contours of the region that we want to turn just surface it's very important that this box here fits that it fits within the contours it cannot be bigger like this will not work ask me within the contours like that see where that boxes okay so I'm gonna move it a little bit lower than a contour is it works better when the box is a little lower than where the contours aren't and what I do is in grasshopper if you have any grasshopper tutorial in the past you probably wouldn't know how to do this but you bring in your components using the parameters toolbar up here so we're gonna bring in a curve components and sets a contours first so I'm going to set all these together at once and then we're gonna set the bounding box as another curve down here like that so I'm just gonna label these so they're easy to understand contours and bounding box so what you wanna do now is want to take these contours and once you type in explode and plug in the contours into the explode option here and this turns all the contours into a series of vertices that's what all these like dark red spots is our spots are you want to use these vertices to create a mesh so way to do that is just type in de l'année mesh it's this option right here then plug in the vertices into the de l'année mesh component you want to make sure that this is flattened before you do that though because we want to mesh the entire set of points together so that's what flattening it does for that this would take a second because it's a large dataset but it will work fine just give a second okay so when it's done I'm gonna turn off the preview of the of the explosion and you can kind of see right now that it has created a mesh of those contours this is not the final result but if you bake that mesh by clicking on the component and clicking bake and we're back on layer one you'll see that it is a very this is something that you know isn't very nice to work with is these meshes you know they're hard to adjust they're hard to edit and they generally run really slowly like if I go to a rendered view it's actually it's not running that bad but we want this to instead to be instead of being a mesh you want to be a surface so I'm going to just turn that off for now and go back to grasshopper and we're going to do is we're going to take this bounding box below the mesh and we're going to divide that into a series of points using the divided surface command so divide surface if you take this bounding box you got to turn it to a service first by typing in boundary surfaces like so so this turns that binding boxing surface and you plug this into that like that and then you want to adjust the U and V numbers here to create a relatively high amount of points so that it creates a high-resolution end result so I might just use a number slider for this and I might set that to 100 and my plug in that to you and I might send another copy and paste that and plug that into V so that's alright you might make it a bit more dense make it 150 oh wait yeah increase the max range in her fat to adjust so let's make that like 150 let's make it 200 let's make this 150 so it looks okay the higher the density of these points the better the surface will end up being but it will take longer to process what you want to do is you want to type in a function called mesh ray so just type in mesh ray and if you don't know how I'm doing that I'm just double clicking in the environment and just typing in the component that I want mesh ready so for the first line here mesh that's this item here plug that into the M for the points that's this here so plugged into the P and for the direction that just means what direction there other vector is projecting and that's just vertical up so you want to type in Z for the vertical z unit vector so that goes into the D give it a second and then I'm going to turn off everything preview everything just except this here that's not going to turn like this as well and you can kind of see that these points are not projected onto that mesh we're almost done to turn this no surface you type in surf from points like so P will be this grid of points right here you want to make sure this is flattened so just flatten that list of points before you plug in into P you this is the exact same number as this U value right here as you can see it's plugging into the U for a surface divide you're gonna want to add one to this though so dragging this number to an addition component then and be just set that to one why I mean real quickly there's going here you know if you'd if I take this surface this curve here charge-off turn to a surface and I divide that I say let's divide it by three and three the reason why we need add one to it is because even though we divide that you by three and the V by three you see there's actually four points right so that's why you need to add one to the you value is to get that extra points that was missing from that original value here so that's why we had one two this right there so this gets plugged in to you and if it works we're done so just look at that second to do its thing they're done so now just make a new layer call it surface then bake that so right click s bake onto surface click OK you don't need grasshopper anymore and there you go so now you have the surface of your sites compare that to your mesh see this mesh is kind of messy looking you can't really trim it your surface is much nicer and much cleaner you can take this you can cut a nice let's say a nice long landscape section from that it's going to take a curve and extrude that up and split this surface isn't that you can hide that and I got a nice landscape section of your sights so this a nutshell is how you take your contours and you turn it into a surface ready for your studio projects or you whatever you want to do for it for the renderings fun stuff

Channel: Frank Hu

Views: 77,414

Keywords: GIS, Urban Topographies, Rhino3D, Grasshopper3D

Id: aLHT21aERms

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019