Hey, what is up nation! In this session
I'm going to teach you how to convert a 2d topographic map or survey into 3d
terrain and Sketchup. The first thing that I wanted to do is
to import the 2d drawing that we'll be turning into 3d terrain, so if you go to
file, import, I have this under here, you want to make sure that the supported
type is the image type that you'll be importing, so just make sure that
selected, I'm going to be importing as an image, not a texture. So I'm going to
select a Liberty Oakes topo, import and then I'm just going to roughly scale it.
It's going to be pretty big, so I'm just going to put it like that, and then what
we're going to do from here is to scale it to the actual size. So you can see
this is pretty pixelated, I'm just going to open up the file so that I can
actually see this image is a lot more pixelated than the actual file, the one
that we just imported, so you can see this is to 200, 1 inch equals 50 feet, so
what I'm going to do here is to select the tape measure tool, we're going to
zoom in and try to get sort of the center of this fuzziness. We don't want to be exact, we're just going to try to be as approximate as you can, I'm going to
select there, and then type in 200 feet. And ask if you want to resize the model?
Yes, I do. You want to make sure you do this first before you model anything,
otherwise you want to do it inside of a group or else it will resize your entire
model. Okay, so we just resize the topo. I'm going to zoom out you can see how
tiny our scale figure is, and then the next thing that I want to do is I want
to draw the outline of the property, because all of the topo that I want to do is inside the property and then from there
I'm just going to I'm not going to draw every single line here, I'm going to use
these larger increments and I may have to refer back to this original photo to
get sort of the numbers, because you can see that these larger increments are in
ten feet increments. That's we're going to do if you have a CAD file and
SketchUp Pro you can import the CAD file a lot of times the server's files will
be three-dimensional so this will be a lot easier, they can skip ahead to check
out the description below if you want to skip ahead pass this part of converting
a 2d image. The next step that I want to do is to change the camera from
perspective to parallel projection. That way we can go to camera standard view
top, and this will just give us a nice view to start tracing everything. Okay, so
now we've converted the 2d image to lines in Sketchup, and now the important
thing is to really understand what the topography is doing. In order just to
make our 3d model. So we want to look at these numbers here and you can see it's
sort of sloping up, it starts to slope down here, so that'll help us sort of
figure out what we want to do. What I've seen a lot of times is that people will
essentially step their topography, so what they'll do here is like this is ten.
So we'll hit ten. So if I go up to here and then go up another ten feet, and you
can do it this way. I highly discourage it, like I said. Topography is
representational and essentially by modeling that way you're taking what is
abstract and making it almost literal. And sketchup will give you the tools
that you don't have to do that. So we're going to quick select all of these is a
little trick, I'm going to hit B to open up all these, it's much easier for me to
click all of these or even to highlight everything, and then what I'll do is
I'll right click and I'll hit select all the same material, delete. So that gives me all the lines without the faces. I'm going to select
this background image that we brought in, and I'm going to delete it because for
what we're doing it doesn't give us enough information to be actually
helpful. At this point I'm just going to use the image to get the information
that I need. What do we need to do now is I'm going to select the property line
that we drew at the beginning, so that I can separate it from the rest of the
terrain that I just drew. So I'm going to zoom in here, I'm going to hold ctrl
click that's just going to give me this you can see next to the arrow, there's a
little plus. That way I can select multiple things at once and not have to
worry about it accidentally deselecting anything, so this just makes
it a little quicker. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is going to edit, and make
group. The first thing I do is I'm going to select this line I'm going to move it
up, make sure some of the blue axis you can even press up if you want to make
sure you're locked to that blue axis. We need ten and we do the same with this
one but when I move it up we'd hit the up arrow to make sure that I'm locked on
access, I'm gonna hit 20. Because we're now 20 feet up. Okay so if you look you
can see this is the sort of model that we have. At this point it's a really good
idea to save your file, you want to make sure that whenever you open a file that
you save it, but at this point is a good time to just make sure that your file is
saved, maybe even make a save as file, in case anything gets messed up. And then
what we're going to do is we're just going to highlight all this, deselect the
property line, come up here to draw, sandbox, and then where it says from
contours, are going to select that. And you can see it made a topography that's
sort of like our property. If we're looking at the top view of the tuple
that we just created, you can see that it doesn't exactly line up with the
property that we created and that's because we don't have any topographic
information that goes beyond the site, so unfortunately there's not like a great
way to do that if you don't have topography that goes beyond the site,
we're going to have to do is kind of Diggy guess, and a good way to guess is
just to assume that the sort of general contours are going to continue. So what
we're going to do is we're just going to draw, so really rough, a line around here,
that sort of replicates what's going on there so like this sweeping arc here, and
we're just going to take another one and we're just going to sweep that around
this edge. Just a little bit over here so we're just going to make another arc
that includes that. And I accidentally snapped over here. Okay then you're just
want to make sure that that is in a single plane and looks like it is. You
can see I'm getting some clipping sometimes that happens in parallel
projections. If you go to perspective, the clipping will stop, so it looks like
everything is pretty much the way we want it, although there is, looks like we
didn't move this, so that's a good thing to just check. We're going to delete this
file and then we select this and what do we add up here that was 70, so that we
want this to be 60, and then this guy here is going to be at 50. And then we'll
look over here this guy is fine at zero, we just want to measure with this guy's
at, it's up 30, so this will be at 20. Press up if you need to. Okay, now what
we're going to do is select all the contours again, deselect our group, do the
same thing draw, sandbox from contours, go back to parallel projection, standard
views, top. Now you can see that our contours cover the entire site, but what
we want is the contours to actually be the sight, in the shape of the sight.
So in this final set we're going to trim the contours that we just made in 3d, so
and it is the shape of our property. So the way we're going to do that is we're
going to take this group, we're going to copy it up, that's the property line
group, then I'm going to go into this group, and I'm going to try to close it
off. You can see that it didn't work, you can go around, you can actually see
pretty quickly that there's a unclosed portion of our model here. So if I close
that we'll see what happens. Okay so that close to that. If for whatever reason it
doesn't close you don't you can't find the portion, I would recommend drawing
like diagonals throughout that piece and it will close off certain portions of
your model, check in 3d to see if it, if there's anything that is out of plane,
and just go around the edge and look for any unclosed edges. Now we've closed our property up. I'm going to use the offset tool, I'm going to offset outside of our
model, so just want to make sure that it's great enough that it covers
everything, going to select the inside and hit delete. I'll go to camera top
just to make sure that we have all the contours covered. So this next part it's
already a group, this is another good point to save just in case something
happens, and we're going to pull this down so just hit P there, now we have
this sort of like large box that's the shape of our site. Now what we're going
to do is I'm going to hit ctrl+X if you're on a Mac that will be command X
to cut that shape. I'm going to come in to our 3d contour that we just made. Hit
edit, paste in place that's going to bring that shape in. I'm going to select
both of these and I'm going to do intersect faces with selection. Now the
important thing of what I just did is that I had a group. If this wasn't a
group this could be a catastrophe, so make sure
that anything you're slicing with is a group. I'm just going to delete this
because I shouldn't need this now and you can see that I have a shape cut into
what we just made and I can actually delete that. And if I double click this
perimeter, go to standard views top, what I'm going to do is I'm going to select
all the lines, I'm going to hit ctrl+shift to deselect, I'm going to deselect our
contours. Now the only thing that should be selected is the perimeter, but I don't
need this stuff, it's all line work, so I'm just going to hide it, you can put it
on a layer if you want and turn that off, or you could delete it if you really
want to, but I'm just going to hide it for now. And now you can see we have a
really nice looking contour that is the shape of our property line. Anyway guys, I
hope this helps, if you like this video please don't forget to like, subscribe
and share this video with your friends. And as always, happy hacking! All right, designers! Just because this episode of designer hacks is over, doesn't mean
we're leaving you out in the cold! Tony's got tons of great content available at designerhacks.com, so join design nation right now and we'll see you on
the next episode of designer hacks!
