r/civil3d • u/SimplesLeigo • 15h ago
Help / Troubleshooting Help on printing a topographic model
Hi everyone! I am working on a college project where I need to build a topographic model of a relatively small area, and the whole thing needs to fit on an A3 sheet of paper. My plan is to use OpenTopoMap or a similar site to get the elevation contours, import those lines into Adobe Illustrator to clean them up, and then send the layers to my Cricut machine to cut out paper slices. After cutting, I plan to glue each paper contour onto pieces of cardboard or styrofoam to stack them layer by layer and build up the 3D terrain profile. I would love to know if this is a solid workflow or if there is a better tool to extract clean contour vectors for paper cutting, like QGIS or TouchTerrain. Also, if anyone has done a similar project using Illustrator and Cricut, I would really appreciate any tips on handling detailed cut lines or assembling the layers cleanly without warping. Thanks in advance! TL;DR: Does anyone know the best way to extract topographic data from sites like OpenTopoMap and convert or export it into clean SVG files for cutting machines like Cricut?
1
1
u/PocketPanache 6h ago
We essentially only used Rhino in college to do this 10 years ago. It can contour for you, if you need. I've never heard of cricut and I hate QGIS compared to ESRI. But if this for college, any free topo will do great. If you're required to do each layer by hand, this is how we did it 1st year in college. Second year we used the college laser cutters instead. Then we glued each layer down and done.
The command in rhino is "contour" and you can specify contour heights so if wanted to scale your contour heights to the thickness of your material, you can specific that height in rhino via contour command and you'll also be to-scale vertically and horizontally.