I am fairly new to grasshopper and I am currently trying to create 2D contour plots, where I can hopefully define the contour values I would like to see on the plots, from a series of XYZ coordinates taken from excel. I have managed to create a 3D surface from my data, however I am now hoping to create the contours much like what can be seen in the attached excel file, however with far flexibility over the ranges of the contours and such that I can load up a greater range of data that will not necessarily be in a uniform grid format.
I have attached the grasshopper file I have developed so far and the excel data I am running the grasshopper file from.
Thanks again for taken the time to read this and in advance for any pointers!
Dan Contour Data.zip (55.4 KB)
In regular Rhino the Patch command can be used to create a surface from irregular spaced data, and the Contour command can be used to create a set of equally spaced contour curves. Beware that if the data is sparse or very irregularly space Patch can produce a surface with large oscillations.
To move xyz data from Excel to Rhino I first copy the data in Excel onto a sheet with the data in three columns with each line as one xyz point. I export the data from that sheet as a .csv file and Import the .csv file into Rhino.
Also note that Patch does not guarantee a result which intersects your input geometry, not even within tolerance. It all depends on how many control-points you’re willing to grant the patcher. If you need a result within some tolerance there will be some iteration involved where successive patches with ever increasing cp-counts are tested against the inputs.