Terrain for laser cutting

Hi!

I am working on a big site model which I am going to laser cut. I have recieved a DWG from the municipalities with height contours in 3D and the roads and buildings flattened in 2D.

To lasercut it I must edit the contours that have buildings on them to create building pads under each building on the laser cut model. What I’ve done before is to edit them manually with ‘copy vertical->trim->join’ (attached images).

But this is a big manual operation especially when the building is on several contours.

So is there some way to get grasshopper to automate these actions? Just turning 10 clicks into 5 clicks would help me alot!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by nikos tzar on September 7, 2014 at 3:27pm

Hello Thomas,

Just from the pictures I would suggest the following approach:

1. Turn all contours into closed polylines/curves (have them continue around the model's perimeter)

2. For every contour, check for intersection with houses.

3. Then subtract those houses from the contour with [region difference]

If you can post your file I can test this and create a definition for you.

cheers,

nikos

Permalink Reply by Thomas S on September 8, 2014 at 12:23am

Thanks for the reply!

Here is the file:

Attachments:

terrain_model.3dm, 297 KB

Permalink Reply by Thomas S on September 8, 2014 at 3:08am

And another thing is the roads.

They need to be copied vertical to the contours that they are on. Then trimmed by the contour so no extra lasercutting is needed. See photos.

Is there a smarter / automated way to do this as well?

Attachments:

Roads1.png, 113 KB
Roads2.png, 112 KB

Permalink Reply by nikos tzar on September 8, 2014 at 6:45am

Hi Thomas,

I did a test with the houses and it seems to work:

I don't have time to look at the streets at the moment but if you understand the procedure followed for the houses, I guess you will be able to do the same for the streets.

If not, I could check it out later when I get home.

good luck,

nikos

Attachments:

terrain_model-nt.gh, 16 KB

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on September 8, 2014 at 11:54am

Hello for the roads you could do the following.

I had to modify a bit the rhino file, added small perimeter lines to roads, so that they could easily be converted to closed polylines in grasshopper. It can be done in grasshopper without modifying the rhino file but needs to much works and its not worth the extra time.

cheers

alex

Attachments: