Topography Dynamo Script

[an803928]

So I'm currently working on iterations for site massing and found it a bit too much effort to constant having to play with the geometry so the street I drew can sit nicely on this sloped topography. I found this  webinar on a dynamo script by mg aeco(?) that I don't think is available but it does exactly what I am looking for. That is, you can draw a street, a property boundary and you can have attach to the topography on FormIt. Here is a link of the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwnlsZ0W4DI 

Now my question is, has FormIt come out with a similar feature/script? Is this something that they are looking to add on?

[josh.goldstein · Accepted solution]

Hi @an803928,

Yes, MG-AEC created that webinar with our help. It looks like they did not share the script along with the video, however.

Attached is a FormIt model that includes the embedded Dynamo script along with sample geometry to demonstrate how it works. You can select the 3D geometry, go to the Properties palette, and Edit Embedded Graph to see how it works or save it as your own version if you'd like.

The script basically takes a series of closed 2D shapes (roads, sidewalks, grass, etc), extrudes them into solids, booleans them from the terrain, and returns a series of solids representing those areas "projected" onto the terrain but in their own resulting instances, which can be painted with the appropriate texture. The example can be extended or modified to work with whatever areas you'd like to project onto the terrain.

Does this help?

[an803928]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for the script, it did work for me! Not that familiar with modifying scripts but it worked for me without changing anything. One thing though, and this is probably me, when the 2d shapes were extruded they came out as meshes and had to convert first to solids before being able to cut geometry. Same thing with the terrain. Otherwise works perfectly ok. 

[josh.goldstein]

Great!

Yes, by default, FormIt outputs the results of Dynamo as meshes. This is to improve performance, as Dynamo may generate lots of very complicated geometry where Meshes will be faster than regular objects.

However, you can simply add a FormItGroupOptions.SetAsMesh node before the SendToFormIt node, and set Meshes to false. Then the result will be regular objects instead of Meshes.