Create Solid 3D terrain on AutoCad Mac (from contours)

[luis-pl]

Hello friends,

This is my first post, I hope I'm not asking for too much. 

I am in need of some help, I've tried various solutions that failed and I hope you can give me a hand here.

I am trying to create a 3D solid out of contour lines that I have. I use Autocad for Mac, there is no way to generate the solid here. Solutions I've tried: exporting to Sketchup and using Sandbox tools, result is a mess, not solid and it just looks off; Also exported to Rhino and used 2 ways of generating the terrain, Patch and MeshPatch, one makes the terrain to soft and untrue to curves, the other made terrain to harsh and hard to manipulate, also, both meshes, not solids; Tried also the LOFT tool, but after selecting 2-3 curves the surfaces disappear, maybe geometry is too complex for LOFT.

After watching some tutorial I found that the DRAPE command creates nice 3D terrain solids but I can't install ACA, nor do I have access to PC, so I could do it myself.

I am in great need of this terrain, it has been 5 days trying to solve this with no success.

So, does any expert here have any equivalent solution of DRAPE for a Mac user?

I attached the file so you could have a look.

Knowing how to do this myself would be the best solution.

I also attached an image of the Rhino model I generated, I want something similar to that, but a little smoother.

Thank you very much! 

 Luis

[dgorsman]

Anything that detailed and large is going to be done as a mesh, not a solid.  Getting the correct curves would be especially hard for a solid.  Even a mesh will be triangulated with hard edges until you take it into software which allow you manipulate edge smoothing (at least, the appearance on screen).

Getting a surface from contour lines is tricky.  One method is to take sample points along the contour line at intervals (typically much less than the contour interval), after which the points can be triangulated to form the surface.  You can still end up with some artifacts and not very pleasing appearance, as the faces will be "striped" along the contours.

Is there any specific requirement for this to be a 3D solid?

[luis-pl]

Hey, thank you for the answer.

The reason why it needs to be a solid is that I'm still going to place some solid volumes on it and then UNION them creating one solid as a whole. Why? I am going to cut it in a CNC router (Ouplan 2015) using dense foam. The 3D printing lab here tells me that the object needs to be a Solid, or watertight, but best if a solid. If I place these new solids on a mesh terrain, then the intersection beneath will create printing problems, as told by the guys from the lab. It's the first time I'm preparing a file for a CNC Router, so I'm taking their words.

Do you have any other idea? 

[john.vellek]

Hi @luis-pl,

You have your solution in this other thread.  If you want to do this in AutoCAD for Mac, the process will be different than the solution that is marked.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[luis-pl]

Thank you for the answer. I created the other thread. @Kevin.Palmer generated the terrain for me, using his ACA tools, unavailable in ACMac. He saved me this time, but my problem is only temporarily solved. I will probably need to generate terrains again in the future and I'd like to avoid asking people to do it for me. I'd like to keep this thread opened in hopes that someone has the solution for a Mac user.

[john.vellek · Accepted solution]

Hi @luis-pl,

On the Mac side of this equation you could try to use LOFT but the complexity of your geometry is likely to limit how well this works.   You would likely have to break your model into several smaller parts and then rejoin them.

If you are on a subscription to One AutoCAD, you then also have the option of installing your Windows license  in a Bootcamp partition and then you could install AutoCAD Architecture to use the DRAPE feature that @Kevin.Palmer used for you.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[luis-pl]

I'll just accept that there are no (efficient) solutions on this case.

The Loft tool doesn't work in many way. Even if I loft 2 curves, the geometry becomes huge, it does not become a regular shape following the normal terrain slope and once I get to a point when two pieces of terrain at higher elevations diverge, then it gets impossible to loft higher than that.

I'll be switching to Windows next year, and that will take care of many problems i've been facing during my 7 years of AC Mac.

Thank you all for the trouble.

L