Loft connecting nearest points of curves

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Hi,
I’m trying to connect a bunch of contour lines drawn from a map in order to recreate an approximation of the terrain.
I’ve tried patching them; but patch does weird things putting sharp lifts and dips where there are none.
I’ve tried lofting them; but the straight lines of the loft connecting two curves don’t track the correspondence between the curves very well, resulting in super twisted surfaces.

Is there a command that will, at each point on the first curve, connect it to closest point on the second curve? Because I think that would give a much saner result than what Loft is currently trying to do.

2

You could try the Patch command.

Note that terrain is typically modeled with meshes and you could use a Delaunay triangulation - see this thread for more info on that:

3

Hi Elika - if you Loft dissimilar curves, you can use the Rebuild or Refit options in Loft to help align things. But I concur with Wim, that depending on exactly what you want to do and what the input is like, surfaces may not be the best approach to terrain modeling.

-Pascal