Congratulations to your team! The Holygon Suite is very impressive. I suppose this post is a feature request although Im sure you have a list of features your working on. When creating grading it is often necessary to know the amount of cut and or Fill required for the project. Landshape looks like it will greatly improve how I create Site Plans. My previous work flow including Native Sketchup tools and other extensions Ive tried. All methods are tricky to get the cut information for a foundation or road and necessary fill for either. Are there plans to address a feature to do this? Is it possible with the current tool set?
Hi Ivan –
Welcome to Holygon Forum!
Sure, team Holygon is happy to help you.
When we created Landshape, we decided to start with solving the hardest problem in terrain modelling. The hardest problem in terrain modelling is terrain editing. More precisely, it is how to effortlessly control terrain properties in a way that is easy, and accurate, and fast.
There are heavy engineering toolsuites. These are accurate, but typically so hard and awkward to use that they immediately kill creativity. On the other hand, there are gameworld engines which are creative, but not very accurate at all.
Landshape aims to take the best of both worlds, and bring them together.
This is another way of saying that Holygon have deliberately pushed the other two main digital terrain challenges to a later development phase. These two challenges are:
• How best to create terrain – Import before editing.
• How best to review terrain – Survey after and during editing.
You are requesting a cut-and-fill feature. This clearly belongs to the review challenge. In Landshape, we call this part of the workflow “Survey”.
Yes, some kind of automated feature like cut-and-fill, mass balancing, volume surveying, is coming to Landshape.
Several other survey concepts are also planned. This includes surveying Height, Slope, Aspect, and so on.
We do not give timeframes for any of this.
With all this said, if you really want to, you can do mass comparisons in Landshape already now, albeit in a very primitive way. I will share how to do this in a follow-up post below.
The best way to support Landshape development, and bring requests into releases, is to buy a subscription and engage in the community.
• Does this answer make sense to you?
Here is a primitive workaround method to to get global terrain-volume snapshots.
Please note that this method targets early versions of Landshape – say 2025 plus minus a year or so.
Please note that this workaround method is planned to become obsolete.
When reading this post, please first check whether the most current version Landshape supports proper volume surveying.
Good. Let’s go:
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First, create your terrain using e.g. Plot or Form. While it can have any perimeter shape, it often is easier to work with a rectangular footprint. Keep it simple.
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Ensure that your terrain in fact has the elevations of the initial volume state. For instance, you can Fit existing terrain to an target, such as a group containing contour lines. Landshape offers several ways of doing this. How you shape terrain does not affect the method.
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Give your terrain plot a vertical thickness by running View Skirt.
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Ensure that the Skirt bottom is at a certain absolute height. Note that the Skirt command itself will only set Skirt height relative to the lowest terrain point. And this lowest point may be different in different terrain states. Thus, you will need to manually set the absolute elevation of the Skirt bottom. To do so, simply enter the Skirt group, and use Sketchup’s pushpull on its bottom, setting it to an absolute model elevation.
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Select the Terrain and the Skirt. This should be 2 groups. Copy them.
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Open a second new and empty instance of Sketchup. Here, Paste-in-place the selected groups.
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In the new model, Explode all of what you pasted. If the terrain is high-density, you may need to wait a little, since Sketchup’s explode can be slow. Then Group the exploded result into one group. Since you exploded the Landshape terrain containers, Landshape will no longer recognize them as terrain. However, if all is done correctly, you now should have one single solid.
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Select it. Sketchup’s Entity Info should report that it is in fact a solid. It should also report the Volume of your one selected solid. You may wish to change the volume unit in Model Info.
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Manually record the volume. For instance in a spreadsheet editor cell. For future reference, also save the model file as a one-time volume snapshot.
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Now, go back to your original Landshape terrain model. Edit and reshape your terrain as you please, using standard Landshape commands. You should keep your initial plot footprint, but you can give it new heights.
When you reach your next proposed elevation state, then repeat steps 3 to 9, above.
You should now have got one snapshot A volume, and another snapshot B volume.
- To get the global mass balance, simply subtract the snapshot A volume from the snapshot B volume.
To get time-series snapshots, you may repeat the above process several times.
• Does this help you?
Thank you for your detailed reply. I understand you are a young app and have many fantastic features to come. My post was more an idea or feature request so im not at all in a hurry for this ability. I see it as something many would want. I design single family custom homes, one out of three projects require a grading component. I would say I am an average user for your of your extension. Im already sold because it does what I need easier than what I have been using! Im sold!
Thank you.
I realize my replies above are a tad bit lengthy, to put it mildly.
Regarding Landshape development, I wanted to contextualise our point of departure, and share some of our ideas about Landshape’s future direction.
Regarding makeshift cut-and-fill, while it takes many words to convey the chain of action, once your hands have learnt it, you should be able to extract the volume of a sane-size terrain in less than 60 seconds.
Anyway – great to hear that Landshape is working for you!