mesh ground surface

Hi everyone, I am a mechanical and HVAC engineer and I need to draw the ground on which a building rests for some studies. I was following GPT a bit, but I think it led me astray. Can I get the ground surface in mesh directly in Rhino, via GH? If so, what procedure should I follow? Thanks to everyone for your patience, I am new to this plugin.

Hi @Lucky, welcome.

Can you describe a little more about what you are after here? Are you working on an energy or a daylighting simulation? Are you working in Rhino/GH to create your model, or are you importing it from some outside source?

When adding the ground, is your primary goal to set the boundary-condition of the ground-contact surfaces of your model? Or are you hoping to use it for another reason?

There are plenty of good ways to create elements like that - but it may help to provide a bit more information about your model and exactly what the goal is?

best,
@edpmay

Ciao edpmay

  1. I need to import the topography of a specific area of ​​Italy;
  2. I need to design a building on this land and do thermal transmittance studies;
  3. I need to study a photovoltaic system and the optimal arrangement of the panels on this land.

Interesting.

Where will you be importing the location from? Is there a GIS database or a survey or something that you will be using? Or is that part of what you are wondering about?

If you are looking for a source for the site data, I might recommend trying something like “CadMapper” which has a very generous free tier, and works very well to download Rhino geometry, which you can then open up and use to create your model.

There may be other ways to access free GIS data using ‘Elk’ or ‘Mask’, which are Grasshopper plugins, but I’ve not tried those ones myself.

Or, you could also always use Sketchup to import the geo-location, and simply import that Sketchup file into Rhino. That also works (assuming you have access to Sketchup and Rhino of course).

best of luck with it!
@edpmay

2 Likes