Hi, I’ve been reading through Anton Huizing’s book on Dynamo, and something caught my eye in it about Dynamo geometry and its space being a lot like a separate program that just integrates with Civil3D.
With that said something I’ve been trying to do for fun for quite awhile is create a solid from a very large surface, to eventually convert into a .stl so I can 3d print it, particularly a contour map of my city. Originally I’ve tried multiple times without success to do Civil3D’s SurfaceToSolid command, which attempts to convert your TIN surface into a 3D shape that I can then export to a .stl. I can get this to work on small surfaces, but I, and many others, run into problems when getting to larger surfaces. Ideally I want to keep as much detail as possible, so I would like to avoid removing a lot of points. When making the solid, C3D will either crash or fail to make the solid (or sometimes blue screen me due to maxing out my RAM).
I have two surfaces, the first surface/boss to battle and make into an object is just a measly 42,120,904 points. This one rarely crashes my computer when making the solid, but it does fail to generate a solid after 2 hours of processing. The big behemoth surface that I eventually would love to convert is 89,637,714 points.
After failing several times with C3D, I thought maybe it’s just C3D’s way of processing isn’t capable of dealing with this many objects/points. But I then thought maybe Dynamo could work, as it’s model space is separate with its own geometry.
I tried creating this graph which converts the surface into triangles of Dynamo Geometry, then convert it to surfaces and then combine those surfaces. Lastly, I add a bit of depth to it. Once that’s done I use Dynamo’s .stl export option.
This works on smaller surfaces, but I still run into crashing issues as it tries to generate too much geometry.
Does anyone have any suggestions to making this more efficient? Or a different recommendation for my end goal? Thanks!