Can you use a large DWG shapefile with 3d co-ordinate to create a mesh in WM?

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Hi there…

Just bought the standard version of WM so I thought I’d dive straight in with a question. I have a heightmap in a tiff format which creates my mesh but it’s not very accurate height wise. I also have a DWG shapefile which outlines all the contours of my terrain beautifully all at the correct height, but can I use it somehow to drive my mesh heights more accurately?

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I’d have to have a little more information to answer this question appropriately, but in general its troublesome to import contours.

Is your DWG a 2D vector with height information? If you can convert it to an SVG shapefile (an open 2D vector graphics format), WM can import it into Layout Mode. However, getting proper heights is problematic.

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Hi Remnant,

Thanks for replying, the DWG file has height information, when you look at the file in a DWG viewer it displays as a very cool 3d contoured model made up from hundreds of contour lines, its actually of a valley in New Zealand. I have converted sections of it into a SVG format and successfully brought these into layout, but as I think your hinting it doesn’t have any height info, so all the points on the multi levelled contour lines come in at the same height. Which is great if I only have 10-20 contour lines to deal with but there are literally hundreds. Do you or anyone reading this have any suggestions for possible software ( that doesn’t cost a fortune ) that might be able to read a large number of contours and convert them to a height map for instance. This seems to work very well in WM.

I also have a scaling issue, along with the DWG file I have a height map in tiff format. This works pretty well in WM but I think the height maps only accurate to 80m as apposed to the contours at 20m hence the discrepancy when I try to match them up in lightwave. Anyhow I can create a great mesh and save this as an .obj file and then bring this into lightwave 9, however the whole mesh is only 3-500mm is size even though I have set the world parameters in WM to meters the extents to 20.73km by 26.44km and exported using “meters”. SO I’m left with scaling the mesh back up to size in lightwave and think this might be adding to some of the accuracy issues… Any ideas on how to get a 1 / 1 mesh exported out of WM, or is this due to the .obj file format and lightwaves handling of it. I’m slightly confused by it all… :shock:

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