Generate Topography Lines from your Meshes

In this video blog tutorial, we'll teach you how to generate 3d topographic lines from your mesh objects.

 Why is this useful or important?

Often times in Archicad we don't have topographic lines from a surveyor to work with. So instead of being able to reference topographic content from others to generate the mesh points, we have to place points manually to shape the mesh as desired.

Often times, this is actually how we'd naturally want to create a mesh anyways! It can be difficult and more time consuming to add topography lines, verse just adding a few known points manually to the mesh to shape it as intended.

But at the end of the day, topographic lines help us describe and visualize the slop of the site, so they definitely are important and useful to see.

Check out the workflow below to learn how to generate them!

Video Chapters

(00:00) 1.Introduction

(00:35) 2. Creating Base Mesh with Random Elevations

(02:05) 3. Creating Single Plane Morphs

(03:00) 4. Elevating Multiple Morphs at 1ft Spacing

(03:20) 5. Solid Element Operations to Intersect

(04:00) 6. Removing Morph Boundaries beyond Topography (

04:50) 7. Plan View of Newly Created Topography

(05:10) 8. Relink Morphs to Home Story

(05:30) 9. Uncut vs Overhead Lines

(06:10) 10. Layers and Wireframe Assignment

(06:50) 11. Removing Morph Faces and Lines

(08:30) 12. Conclusion