I need to download GIS data from USGS. I found their “TopoBuilder” tool and it exports files in “.gdbtable” format. I see a number of online converters, but they are all behind a pay wall. Does anyone know of a way to read these files in Rhino? I usually use CADMapper, but the topo lines it spits out don’t look accurate enough seems as of they are somehow interpolated.
Or, another reliable method to get topo lines into Rhino would work, too. This is a one-off situation.
If you are willing to use Grasshopper, you can grab USGS topography with Heron’s RESTTopo tool (available through the package manager) and skip the TopoBuilder step. RESTTopo queries the 3DEP service from USGS with any boundary you set to get a DEM tiff file which can then be turned into a mesh surface with ImportTopo . Make sure to set the Earth Anchor Point first and that your boundary is of a reasonable size (10’x10’ is too small). Once you have this surface, you can contour it to get the topo lines.
20240214_USGS Topo Example.gh (12.5 KB)
Heron can also import some GDB folders/files with the ImportVector component. If you share a link to an example GDB, I can try to getting it working.
-Brian
