Creating Topography Using Contours in SketchUp: Step-by-Step Guide

Alright, welcome back. So in this video we are going to build topography using actual topography lines using the from contours tool on the sandbox toolbar. So let's first go to file open and go into our C drive.

Go to our SKP 101 file downloads folder. Open a topography folder and then let's open up topography from contours. Click open.

So to generate our topography using the from contours option on our sandbox toolbar, let's first add our sandbox toolbar again to our menu bar if we if it's no longer there. I don't want my shadows anymore, so I'm going to drag that out and then click X or you could uncheck the shadows from here. So let's open up, let's click sandbox and let's bring sandbox should open up like this and let's bring that into here.

So from contours is this button right here. So say we wanted to manually draw some contours, right? And let's say that we wanted to move each of these up one foot. And then this one up two feet.

If I was to select all of these contours and click the from contours button, it would automatically generate a topography. So it's a quick way of doing it. But for the most part, a typical workflow with any sort of architectural project is we typically have contours either from a DWG or a PDF or some sort of lines that we can bring into SketchUp to actually generate topography from.

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So I'm going to undo this because we've actually provided a topography AutoCAD file and also SketchUp file. If we open up the topography folder in the SKP 101 file downloads, you'll see that we have a couple of these contours and site plan files. If you open up this in AutoCAD, you can see that we have some DWG AutoCAD hardline topography lines.

And if I was to orbit around, you can see that these are three dimensional. I'll minimize this window. And we also have the import site plan CAD.

And these are actual line work of our park that we will use to. We've also provided a 2D model of our site plan components in 2D edges, a parking lot and architectural outlines. I will minimize this again and go back to my SketchUp file.

One thing to note is that if you were using the free version of SketchUp, you will not be able to import DWG files. If I go to file import, go to topography, you can see that I have options to import DWG. However, the free version, you're not able to import DWG files.

So I have also provided a SketchUp version of the contours as well as the lines for the site plan. So let's import the SketchUp file. We're so we are all on the same page.

I will import this. And then as it loads, let's hover over the origin and then let's click the origin. If I go to my components dialog box and go to home, you can see that I have import contours has appeared here.

If I imported the DWG file, it would also show up here, except it'll have dot DWG at the end of it. Next, I will go to my select tool, right click on one of these contours and explode. Now, these are individual lines.

We know that we have been building our park with a rectangular outline up to this point. But if I select my lines and then click the from contours tool at the top, you can see that my contours have been generated. However, these edges have been cut off.

This is because the from contours tool does not automatically assume you want a rectangle. It will only draw shapes from your endpoints to endpoints, like from here to here and here to here. It doesn't automatically fill in the blank whether or not you want a rectangle or not.

So I will undo that toposurface. And before I go click my from contours tool, I will go to my line tool and I will begin to square off each of these corners. So I will draw this line to this origin and then I see here that those line up.

So I'll escape that and I'll draw this to this point here, but I will infer the green axis and lock that by holding shift. Now it won't be able to move any direction. I'll hover over this to snap to this point so that it aligns.

Then I'll do the same thing here, clicking this point along the red axis, holding down shift to lock the red axis direction, and click here to reference that point. And then the final right here is click this, holding down shift to lock the red axis, clicking this. And then I will click escape.

Now I can click and drag to the left and select all of my lines and then click the from contours tool to generate our topography in this nice shape. I will save my file. We can now select all of our lines by clicking and dragging to the right and then holding shift for our plus and minus selection.

We can deselect our toposurface so we only select our lines and hit delete to erase those lines. We have a clean even topography surface. If I wanted to bring back my topography lines, we already have them preloaded as a component.

So I can click and match our origin and I can bring those back. We really haven't deleted them and I will undo that. Now let's bring in our architectural components, go to file import, and go back to our skp-101 file downloads folder and click on community park architecture.

And go back to our skp-101 file downloads folder and click on community park architecture import. Without clicking anything, let's hover over our origin. Because we don't want these components to be buried within the topography, we'll hover over this, infer the blue direction up about say this high, and then click.

So they're floating above our topography. And then I will go to my selection tool, right click, explode into individual components. So you can see if I go into another folder and then back, you see now I have exploded these in individual components, just what I wanted.

Now let's save our file. And in the next video, we're going to talk about how to get flat top surfaces underneath our architecture components that we brought in. I will see you in the next video.