Is there a way to create a combined model of intersecting excavation ditches that makes one model with the lowest levels

It’s common to deliver digging models for machine controlled excavators in my job, and at the moment every discipline delivers their own ditch, and it’s up to the people on site to combine them, because what they really need is the combined shape, and to know where the lowest level is all the time. This would be great if I could automate. Since all the objects are open U shaped meshes, I can’t use booleans
Any tips?
Thank’s

Could it work to flip everything and use drape?

Flipping it was my initial thought as well. But I don’t think drape is the way to go. I need a drape that only uses the vertices that already exists if that makes sense? So i don’t add any geometry

Have you tried using booleans even though they are open?
With open meshes it can be a bit more tricky, but can work. I think you might sometimes find you need to flip the normals of one of them to get the result you want

The problem is that I might have 50 models that intersect in various ways, so I need a way that I know just works

Can you show an example file or even an image of an example?

This is an actual delivery. when viewed in perspective, it becomes almost impossible to make any sense of it

Is that generated from some kind of survey process?
And do you just have to combine it into one mesh or are you trying to clean it up so it looks neater too?

I was thinking about a rainflow simulation plugin where you set the water source points and get a trace of the bottom of the troughs. I’m not sure this is going to help you generate a final mesh but it could give you the lowest levels.

This sort of thing…
EVE
QUELEA

It’s an interesting real world problem!

It’s the planned ditches that come from every discipline. some of them are from electro, and some from W&S . And the goal is to simplify it into one mesh, so that the poor person in the excavator doesn’t have to flip through 20 models to figure out what he should dig. Because unless there is a big diffference in time of digging for the individual ones, all they need to know is the combined shape, and the common lowest level

Also, another option might be to create intersection contours with XY planes and then rebuild the mesh from these perhaps using a voxeliser plugin.

There is a Rhinoo3dMedical plugin that can create models from medical scan images so I’m wondering if something exists that could take a flattened list of contour curves and build a mesh.

Hi @gudmund.obrestad,

Is there any chance you could post the actual model in your image so we can have something to play with?

And how accurate does the combined model have to be?

Sure, here is a file… I did’nt include all the ditches, as that would make things too insane. The result should be 100%, but it’s for machine control, so a few millimeters off should be ok :slight_smile:groefter.3dm (701.7 KB)