📙 TOPO101: Topo Kit Basics

CAMPUS > TOPO101: Topo Kit Basics

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This series of modules will cover the basics of Topo Kit for Grasshopper in Rhino. The example files will show how you can draw geometries in Rhino and reference them into a Grasshopper file to start building and modifying topography using flexible combinations of contours, spots, breaklines, walls, curbs, and curb cuts. They can be watched here on this page or as a playlist.

Course Modules

Part 0: Example Files How To

7 min

General overview on how we set up our example files

A few tips on starting to use them

Part 1: Topo Kit Basics

24 min

Topo from contours

Designing walls along with topography

Topo Areas

Part 2: Modify Topo

3 min

create topo from geometries in Rhino

discretely modify topography

Part 3: Create and Draw Areas

6.5 min

Create areas

Draw areas as meshes or surfaces projected to the topography

Part 4: Walls and Curbs

7 min

Creating and manipulating walls and curbs

Creating Curb Cuts with simple inputs

Drawing Curbs and Walls as Masses

Download TOPO101 Course Files

(Land Kit version 0.112)

TOPO101 Module 0: Example Files How To

Get a quick tour of how we are formatting our example files for this course.

This includes:

Labeling and Label Colors

Land Kit Version

Geometry Pipeline - Referencing geometry from a Rhino layer

Land Kit input/output strategies

Preview Component (with a color swatch)

Toggling Preview on and off (CTRL Q)

Enabling and Disabling Components (CTRL E)

TOPO101 Module 1: Topo Kit Basics

Here we cover the basics of Topo Kit so that you can use your contour curves to create topography. We do a brief intro on how walls and areas work as well. This video is the longest and provides the information a bit differently than the others.

We start by showing how to create a geo set from your contours. A geo set is a collection of geometry that is used to create a topo instance. In this example, we can input geometry from individual layers of your choosing.

Once the geo set is made you can create a topo instance. Once you have created a topo instance, we can “draw” it as a mesh with your particular parameters.

Then we take a quick look at how to create wall instances from simple curve and spot inputs. You can use our wall instances as topographic features to change your topography and you can “draw” walls as polysurfaces or “breps”.

Finally, we explore how topo areas can be defined in your file so that you are working in 2D, but you can get resulting geometries in 3D for rendering or other deliverables.

TOPO101 Module 2: Modifying Topo

Here we explore how to quickly create a topographic mesh from a collection of different geometry in your Rhino file. These geometries can include:

Contours

Spots

Breaklines

Other Geo (surfaces or meshes to follow)

Mendlines (for minimizing Delaunay meshing errors)

All of these geometries can be quickly collected into a geo set simply by providing a parent layer name. And then you can create a topo instance from your geo set and other topographic features.

You can also add modifications to a topographic instance with another geo set. Define a boundary or boundaries where you want to make changes and draw the desired geometries inside this boundary. All of these changes will be integrated into your topo with the modify topo component.

Finally, as usual, “draw” your topo with different parameters, using the draw topo component.

TOPO101 Module 3: Create and Draw Areas

In this module we talk about how you can delineate zones or ‘areas’ within your topo as previously introduced in the first video. We look a little more closely here to understand how to create area inputs and the different ways they will be interpreted or drawn.

TOPO101 Module 4: Walls and Curbs

Finally, we look at topo features, specifically Walls and Curbs. We cover some different time-saving features:

how you can create multiple topo features all at once with collections of geometry

how topo features help manipulate the topo mesh

how to create curb cuts(!) from very minimal inputs

how to draw curb and wall masses

We also cover a bit about how breaklines, contours, and spots interact with these features, conflicts to watch out for and how to make all of the elements work together harmoniously.