In my experience, working with a “curves-in MeshPatch-out” attitude towards topography has worked well and has contained enough information to send to consultants and to use as the basis for renderings. This means working with a combination of projected contours that come from a survey and outlines of designed features (eg the start/stop elevations for a winding path, the elevation of key points along a building’s elevation, a series of terrace walls etc. etc.) to serve as the input for a simple MeshPatch. A typical workflow is:
- Receive land contours
- Project contours in 3D space (if necessary)
- Draw boundary lines of established features (eg, building entrances, terraces, start/stop elevations of ramps etc etc.) in 3D space. Delete existing land contours as needed, add land contours as needed
- Run MeshPatch
If the triangulation looks funky, add/subtract guide curves as necessary. This is iterative, and towards the end of the process, it might make sense to adjust the mesh vertices rather than adding/subtracting guide curves.
Directly editing control points of a surface can be tricky, because the UV-grid needs to follow the curvature of terrain—and the curvature of terrain can change abruptly—so you’ll most likely be working with surface patches. With surface patches you’ll need to constantly smooth their edge connections. In addition, if you have buildings that sit inside a patch, it will be very challenging to maintain a designed elevation of grade along the elevation of a building while keeping the CV count low to maintain editability.
Attached is a script that has helped me quickly project pathways into a landscape. Note that it will work only for paths with a constant slope (which is usually what you want between landings) and you’ll need place landings beforehand.
Side-note: Tween-crv helps immensely when you have features like terrace walls that need to blend between in elevation and in plan.
topo_path_distribution.gh (32.4 KB)