Adding Contours to a Mesh in ARCHICAD
I shared/wrote as many blog posts in March, 2013 as I have in all of 2016 thus far. That weighs on me. A lot. My goal is to spend the rest of 2016 writing, both here and over on the Graphisoft North America blog. We’ll see how that goes. Fortunately, I’ve been busy with design projects and family. Both good things. Though I still don’t know if I am happier when writing or architecting. Maybe I’ll figure that out in 2017. Probably not.
Currently, I’m writing an article about the day I forgot how to use the Mesh Tool in ARCHICAD (the blog post turned into two posts: forgetting one click and how new users don’t know how to click). Rather than go into the details of how to add contours to an existing Mesh in that article, I decided to record a quick video, and share it here first.
By the way, yes I know the audio is full of static. I have been waiting and waiting for the new line of MacBook Pros to be released. Hopefully there won’t be many more videos recorded on my late 2011 MBP (because I’ll have a new machine soon, not because I’ll be too busy to record videos!).
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Betsy
Jared – I am wondering if you know of a way to add the contours to a mesh in the way you describe, but have the ridges not show up in elevations and/or linework perspective views? I currently just mask them, but if there is a way for them to not show up at all, that would be far more efficient!
Jared Banks
Betsy, not that I know of. The best solutions I can offer are: for the Mesh, in the settings under Floor Plan and Section, select show user defined ridges only and set all ridges to smooth. That’ll get it to at least only showing the contour lines. So the fewer contour lines you create, the fewer you’ll see. If you really need to hide the contour lines, you could turn the Mesh into a Morph and then change all the edges to hidden or soft. But then you have a Morph to deal with instead of a Mesh.
My solution is just to accept the contour lines in section and elevation or build the site mesh in a way that I don’t need contours (ei, only setting the elevations of edges of the site Mesh). This works great for more sketchy sites where I don’t have a survey and am just trying to get the right feel of the site.
Betsy
Jared, I like the idea of converting it to a morph (once you know it’s relatively finalized, at least). Thanks for the insight!
Jared Banks
Let me know how it goes!
Luke (Not Skywalker)
Hi Jared
So, I have a mesh of a massive site, with quite complex contours received from a land surveyor. I’m adding the contours to the mesh in the same way as your video, and checking my the mesh on 3D after every move. When I add some contours though, the mesh disappears in 3D. It’s still selectable, though only the nodes are visible. I then have to ctrl+Z until the mesh is fine again. The backtracking makes working all but impossible…!
Also, when I add some contours, it adds polygon lines, as if it changes the height at some nodes? These are impossible to fix, and in most cases also create the gone-in-3D issue above. Any advice? Because this is halting any and all progress at this stage… Also note that I have no solid element operations going on somewhere – it’s a brand new empty file.
Jared Banks
It sounds like the mesh you are creating is getting too complex and contour lines are overlapping. Simplify the mesh by creating contour lines based off simplified polylines rather than adhering to every node on the surveyor’s plan.
Step one: trace the surveyor’s data with polylines (with the aim to reduce the number of nodes as much as possible)
Step two: hide the surveyor’s data and verify the polylines you created appear logical and don’t overlap
step three: create all the contours in the mesh (don’t elevate them yet)
step four: verify the mesh has all the contours in 3D and is visible
step five: elevate each contour. Check every 5-10 contours that the 3D is still working. Save regularly. If the 3D fails, load and go contour by contour til you find the error.