Hello all!
We have recently had a topographic survey done on our garden, and I have been trying to design the garden. However, because the site has a number of slopes in it, I was wondering, how to use the topo heights and map this in Google, or if this is possible? Any ideas? The main thing it I want it to be quite accurate and down to the nearest 100mm whereas I believe the Geo location won’t be as accurate.
Thanks in advance!
Hello,
You can indeed use digital globe data to get a rough height. to do that, geolocate your model and once you grabbed the area, go to your tags and turn on location terrain.
But it won’t be very precise.
There’s a more complicated but more precise way, since you have a dwg topographic survey.
Using autocad, there are LISPs that allow you to move automatically your altitude points, based on the “LEVEL” parameter, along Z axis. You can then import it in sketchup and use a triangulation plug in, such as TIG’s triangulate points ( [Plugin] Triangulate Points • sketchUcation • 1 )
otherwise ask your surveyor if he can send you those points in 3D instead of the 2D plan you attached
Another way would be to draw the contours yourself from the informations you have in your dwg (let’s say every 10cm height), and then use create from contours inside sketchup. Not the shortest way but effective if you don’t want to throw yourself into those LISP commands. (kind of fun too ! 
)
If you can’t use AutoCAD to do this, you could create guides at the relative heights and use TopoShaper plugin in SketchUp Pro TopoShaper | SketchUcation
it’ll take some work making the “cloud” though. And a problem is the text won’t be there in SketchUp.
Oh, I missed the reference to Google. I don’t have an idea what you’d do there. I was thinking of SketchUp Pro.
It is quite possible for your ‘surveyor’ to provide you with a DWG that is NOT 2d, but with its parts set out in 3d.
Then making the surface-model of your garden will be much easier…
There are also extensions/plugins which let you create 3d surfaces from a collection of 3d-points - e.g. in a CSV file…
I see where you want to end up but you need some data to get you started…
I don’t have AutoCad at home but I used to deal with this type of survey map by using an AutoLisp script to draw vertical lines corresponding to the height texts so after importing into SketchUp I could use the Sandbox from contours tool to fit a terrain surface on them.