Hey, what is up nation! In this session I'm going to teach you how to convert a
2d topographic map or survey into 3d terrain and Sketchup.
The first thing that I wanted to do is to import the 2d drawing that we'll be
turning into 3d terrain, so if you go to file, import, I have this under here, you
want to make sure that the supported type is the image type that you'll be
importing, so just make sure that selected, I'm going to be importing as an
image, not a texture. So I'm going to select a Liberty Oakes topo, import and
then I'm just going to roughly scale it. It's going to be pretty big, so I'm just
going to put it like that, and then what we're going to do from here is to scale
it to the actual size. So you can see this is pretty pixelated, I'm just going
to open up the file so that I can actually see this image is a lot more
pixelated than the actual file, the one that we just imported, so you can see
this is to 200, 1 inch equals 50 feet, so what I'm going to do here is to select
the tape measure tool, we're going to zoom in and try to get sort of the
center of this fuzziness. We don't want to be exact, we're just going to try to be as
approximate as you can, I'm going to select there, and then type in 200 feet.
And ask if you want to resize the model? Yes, I do. You want to make sure you do
this first before you model anything, otherwise you want to do it inside of a
group or else it will resize your entire model. Okay, so we just resize the topo.
I'm going to zoom out you can see how tiny our scale figure is, and then the
next thing that I want to do is I want to draw the outline of the property,
because all of the topo that I want to do is
inside the property and then from there I'm just going to I'm not going to draw
every single line here, I'm going to use these larger increments and I may have
to refer back to this original photo to get sort of the numbers, because you can
see that these larger increments are in ten feet increments. That's we're going
to do if you have a CAD file and SketchUp Pro you can import the CAD file
a lot of times the server's files will be three-dimensional so this will be a
lot easier, they can skip ahead to check out the description below if you want to
skip ahead pass this part of converting a 2d image. The next step that I want to
do is to change the camera from perspective to parallel projection. That
way we can go to camera standard view top, and this will just give us a nice
view to start tracing everything. Okay, so now we've converted the 2d image to
lines in Sketchup, and now the important thing is to really understand what the
topography is doing. In order just to make our 3d model. So we want to look at
these numbers here and you can see it's sort of sloping up, it starts to slope
down here, so that'll help us sort of figure out what we want to do.
What I've seen a lot of times is that people will essentially step their topography, so
what they'll do here is like this is ten. So we'll hit ten. So if I go up to here
and then go up another ten feet, and you can do it this way. I highly discourage
it, like I said. Topography is representational and essentially by
modeling that way you're taking what is abstract and making it almost literal.
And sketchup will give you the tools that you don't have to do that. So we're
going to quick select all of these is a little trick, I'm going to hit B to open
up all these, it's much easier for me to click all of these or even to highlight
everything, and then what I'll do is I'll right click and I'll hit select all
the same material, delete. So that gives me all the lines
without the faces. I'm going to select this background image that we brought in,
and I'm going to delete it because for what we're doing it doesn't give us
enough information to be actually helpful. At this point I'm just going to
use the image to get the information that I need. What do we need to do now is
I'm going to select the property line that we drew at the beginning, so that I
can separate it from the rest of the terrain that I just drew. So I'm going to
zoom in here, I'm going to hold ctrl click that's just going to give me this
you can see next to the arrow, there's a little plus. That way I can select
multiple things at once and not have to worry about it accidentally
deselecting anything, so this just makes it a little quicker. Okay, so now what I'm
going to do is going to edit, and make group. The first thing I do is I'm going
to select this line I'm going to move it up, make sure some of the blue axis you
can even press up if you want to make sure you're locked to that blue axis.
We need ten and we do the same with this one but when I move it up we'd hit the
up arrow to make sure that I'm locked on access, I'm gonna hit 20. Because we're
now 20 feet up. Okay so if you look you can see this is the sort of model that
we have. At this point it's a really good idea to save your file, you want to make
sure that whenever you open a file that you save it, but at this point is a good
time to just make sure that your file is saved, maybe even make a save as file, in
case anything gets messed up. And then what we're going to do is we're just
going to highlight all this, deselect the property line, come up here to draw,
sandbox, and then where it says from contours, are going to select that. And
you can see it made a topography that's sort of like our property. If we're
looking at the top view of the tuple that we just created, you can see that it
doesn't exactly line up with the property that we created and that's
because we don't have any topographic information that goes beyond the site, so
unfortunately there's not like a great way to do that if you don't have
topography that goes beyond the site, we're going to have to do is kind of
Diggy guess, and a good way to guess is just to assume that the sort of general
contours are going to continue. So what we're going to do is we're just going to
draw, so really rough, a line around here, that sort of replicates what's going on
there so like this sweeping arc here, and we're just going to take another one and
we're just going to sweep that around this edge. Just a little bit over here so
we're just going to make another arc that includes that. And I accidentally
snapped over here. Okay then you're just want to make sure that that is in a
single plane and looks like it is. You can see I'm getting some clipping
sometimes that happens in parallel projections. If you go to perspective, the
clipping will stop, so it looks like everything is pretty much the way we
want it, although there is, looks like we didn't move this, so that's a good thing
to just check. We're going to delete this file and then we select this and what do
we add up here that was 70, so that we want this to be 60, and then this guy
here is going to be at 50. And then we'll look over here this guy is fine at zero,
we just want to measure with this guy's at, it's up 30, so this will be at 20.
Press up if you need to. Okay, now what we're going to do is select all the
contours again, deselect our group, do the same thing draw, sandbox from contours, go
back to parallel projection, standard views, top. Now you can see that our
contours cover the entire site, but what we want is the contours to actually be
the sight, in the shape of the sight. So in this final set we're going to trim
the contours that we just made in 3d, so and it is the shape of our property.
So the way we're going to do that is we're going to take this group, we're going to
copy it up, that's the property line group, then I'm going to go into this
group, and I'm going to try to close it off. You can see that it didn't work, you
can go around, you can actually see pretty quickly that there's a unclosed
portion of our model here. So if I close that we'll see what happens. Okay so that
close to that. If for whatever reason it doesn't close you don't you can't find
the portion, I would recommend drawing like diagonals throughout that piece and
it will close off certain portions of your model, check in 3d to see if it, if
there's anything that is out of plane, and just go around the edge and look for
any unclosed edges. Now we've closed our property up. I'm going to use the offset
tool, I'm going to offset outside of our model, so just want to make sure that
it's great enough that it covers everything, going to select the inside
and hit delete. I'll go to camera top just to make sure that we have all the
contours covered. So this next part it's already a group, this is another good
point to save just in case something happens, and we're going to pull this
down so just hit P there, now we have this sort of like large box that's the
shape of our site. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to hit ctrl+X if
you're on a Mac that will be command X to cut that shape. I'm going to come in
to our 3d contour that we just made. Hit edit, paste in place that's going to
bring that shape in. I'm going to select both of these and I'm going to do
intersect faces with selection. Now the important thing of what I just did is
that I had a group. If this wasn't a group
this could be a catastrophe, so make sure that anything you're slicing with is a
group. I'm just going to delete this because I shouldn't need this now and
you can see that I have a shape cut into what we just made and I can actually
delete that. And if I double click this perimeter, go to standard views top, what
I'm going to do is I'm going to select all the lines, I'm going to hit ctrl+shift to
deselect, I'm going to deselect our contours. Now the only thing that should
be selected is the perimeter, but I don't need this stuff, it's all line work, so
I'm just going to hide it, you can put it on a layer if you want and turn that off,
or you could delete it if you really want to, but I'm just going to hide it
for now. And now you can see we have a really nice looking contour that is the
shape of our property line. Anyway guys, I hope this helps, if you like this video
please don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video with your friends.
And as always, happy hacking!
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