Sketchup Tutorial - Creating Terrains from Spot Elevations

in this winning with Sketchup video we're going to go over a quick and easy method for creating terrains from spot elevations in order to do this we're going to use a couple different plugins the first one we're going to use is draw along and this is from the freedo tools and you can find it here in the toolbar if you have all of your free doe tools turned on if you don't you can also access it through the freedo tools launcher and we can see that here this is draw along so we're going to call that and what's nice about draw along is there's a couple different options that are going to be useful in doing this the first is we're able to constrain the edges that we draw to the blue axis so we're going to constrain everything to the Z to do that we want to toggle on this button here so we're going to pick the button that says vector and then we're going to select the Z vector direction and we can see that here on our cursor we have this blue indicator here so every edge that we would draw and see no matter where we go we're locked here into the blue direction which is what we want so the other thing we want to do is we're not going to draw actual edges we're going to going to toggle on this guide option so we can see that edge turns off and guide turns on and we want to toggle both guide lines and guide points so we want both of these turned on and the other thing I'm going to do is turn off inferences so I'm going to turn off all inferences and you can toggle that on and off with the Alt key as well but with those settings in place we're going to go through now and all we're going to do is find the spot elevation and we're going to click on the marker and we're just going to draw up and type in the measurement there so we want to make sure that we're set to the same units of the drawing and I am I'm set to meters here so I can just type to 7.50 enter if I was in a different unit I would have to type the m' after every measurement to make sure i'm in meters and I'm just going to go around really quick and we're going to draw up in this direction here and make sure we enter the measurement here and you can see I panned around and it you have to be careful sometimes it'll toggle off your vector constraint so I'm going to turn that back on and type to seven point two three enter and if I look here what's happening draw along is drawing a construction guide up in the blue direction and at the very end it's putting a guide point and that guide point is really what we need and that's what we're going to use to create our terrain we're using the guide lines as well just because it's a little easier to see the ones that we've already done so if those guidelines weren't there now we'd have a hard time seeing those guide points up in the air so it helps just visually to see that so I'm going to pause the video here and I'm going to go through and create all of these guide lines with the guide points on top and then we'll come back and create our terrain okay so here we have all of our guide lines drawn up and you can see all of the guide points here up in the air and these are sitting and essentially at the heights of all of these spot elevations and these are showing what the terrain is going to look like now what we need to do is create a mesh out of these so we need to skin these and create it terrain surface we're going to use topo shaper to do this so this is from fritto six as well and there's a Metin the main function of topo shaper here is to create terrains from contour lines but there's also an option to create terrains from point clouds so what we can do here we're going to select from right to left and we're going to select all of our guidelines and our guide points and we're going to group them together now we don't want to select the guide points that draw along created down on the surface of the plan here so we can see there's guide points down here we only want the ones that are sitting up in the air because that's where our terrain is going to be so now we have our group here selected we're going to run topo shaper and what I usually do is I'm going to turn up the roundness here a little bit and I'll usually use this best fitting rectangle option and we want to pick this button here which is the auto calculation and that's going to go through and build our terrain we can see that it connected all of our guide points there and triangulated everything now the other thing we want to do is we're going to turn on ISO contours and we want to go through and let's lower this to maybe point one here so I want a good number of these iso contours here now I'm happy with that we can also create a skirt if we wanted to but we don't need to do that now and we also want to make sure that we have this button toggled here before we run this and this is allowing us to use the guide points with the lines that we created as well so now what we're going to do is get in here and I just want to grab the contour lines that we created we can see we just have the contour lines here we can actually even delete everything else if we wanted but for now we're just going to grab those contour lines because we're going to use those and now we're going to run topo shaper to create a topography from contours so we use the first option and the cloud points to create our contour lines and now we'll create a better mesh overall with topo shaper and we're going to create a nice clean quad based mesh here so now what we have is this and let's get in here we can get rid of the contour lines now and we can see the comparison here so look almost identical with the benefit of the quad based mesh is that we could get in here and use artisan for sculpting we also have the benefit now of using things like quad face tools to select rings and edge loops and we can also use the artisan to do make cleaner operations things like that if we're going to maybe cut out driveways or landscape beds we'll get a much nicer mesh as a result using this quad base geometry so let's get in here we can delete that and we can see now that just using the spot elevations without having to create contour lines we are able to create a very nice clean terrain overall and we can drop that down to our surface delete our guides and that is how our terrain goes so I hope that was helpful and we will see you in the next video

Channel: Winning With Sketchup

Views: 43,401

Rating: 4.9405942 out of 5

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Id: oWjVrL0oetQ

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2016