Roads on Terrain/Topography

Rhino
1

Hey there,

recently I’ve been searching ways to implement my idea of putting roads on terrain.

The problem is:

I have a terrain and a road boundary lines (terrain and road boundary lines are in a file that is attached attached to post).

Width and shape of roads alternate in different parts of a road. I need to put boundary lines on topography and modify it so that the both edges of a road are on the same elevation and they ascend/descend accordingly following the terrain elevation, just like it would be on a normal road.

Every road-modelling on terrain solution I’ve discovered needs a centerline, which then origins the path and after that path modifies terrain accordingly. But this isn’t my case, because, as I wrote earlier, I need to build roads with outer boundaries of it and not the centerline.

I’ve researched different forum topics and videos and the closest I got to solution is this forum post ( Road on Terrain - #33 by Brian_Washburn ) from Brian Washburn ( Profile - Brian_Washburn - McNeel Forum ), which is, by the way, an absoloutely amazing script he provided for a similar type of problem. So, huge props to him.

But it doesn’t sometimes work as expected in different parts of a road surface (I guess the problem is with sometimes too complicated road shape).

I just wanted to ask if there’s a known solution for this type of a problem? I need it just for visualization purposes only, to accurately recreate site enviroment that my building proposal is built on. The location I want to recreate is in Viikki, Helsinki, Finland. (the base map is also attached if needed).

Road Outer Boundaries and Terrain.3dm (988.6 KB)

Viikki - Base Map.pdf (1.3 MB)

Thank you in advance.

2

Hi @Jonathan_Ive ,
I’ve adapted the definition from my other post to your model and go it working by adjusting the units to meters instead of millimeters and playing with some of the parameters. These parameters could still use a lot more tweaking, but it took about 6 minutes to generate the final output, so I held off.
Road Outer Boundaries and Terrain - Meters.gh (80.8 KB)
Road Outer Boundaries and Terrain - Meters.3dm (1.0 MB)

image
image1920×1009 180 KB

-Brian

3

Thank you so much for your provided response. I will try to implement it in my project. Also I want to highlight your GH knowledge, it is just incredible for me. I learned so many solutions for differrent situations from your script, so again thank you so much.

And an off-topic question if you mind:

is Grasshopper relying primarily on CPU? In case I want to speed up my GH workflow, I want to make sure to upgrade my CPU first, right?

4

Glad I could be of help! I’ve learned so much from this forum myself, I’m happy to contribute.

Generally GH benefits from a fast CPU. There are some efforts to harness GPUs for GH, but it’s not native to GH yet.

-Brian