Topo Kit is a Grasshopper plugin created to make topographic design more sensible. By easily creating and modifying features in the landscape that help to define topography you can avoid the sticky problem of creating and recreating models with contour drawings. Traditionally, 3D modeled landscapes required contours to construct, but Topo Kit provides various new methods to building topography allowing for a rapid and more iterative design process.
Topo Kit buildshigh quality topography and topographic features in Rhino and Grasshopper. It was developed with an understanding of the complexities involved in creating a smooth, high resolution mesh. The basic components of Topo Kit’s topographic generation allows users to define their level of detail as well as fine tune their design using simple geometry such as points and curves. Topo Kit’s workflow also allows targeted modifications to thetopography in defined zones allowing the user to pinpoint their edits.
The decision to design in 2D or 3D will no longer be in question with Topo Kit. Set the grades of the features that you know and work from there. Don’t start by drawing all of the contours first. Topo Kit will help you discover contours.
A key feature of Topo Kit is its use of topographic features to help shape the landscape. Walls, curbs, curb cuts, stairs, and paths along with breaklines all fit within the design and act as modifying elements. For example, a wall or curb is both a piece of geometry as well as a modifying feature with a top and bottom to adjust the topography accordingly in real time. If you raise or lower the wall’s top or bottom the topography responds as well. Similar to all the tool sets of Land Kit, Topo Kit’s computational power lies within its use of class instances rather than the geometry itself for processing higher level modifications. Topo instances dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of processing large, complex sites so that the user can iterate more effectively.
A Pro feature of Topo Kit is its use of defined plan areas by material. Areas are created in 2D, sorted by their preferred material makeup and translated to 3D space. Adjustments to where a lawn ends and the asphalt begins can be done in 2D space which Topo Kit will quickly projectto the 3D Topo.
The power of this algorithmic design approach is amplified by Topo Kit’s flexible outputs that you can use to quickly and easily translate your designs to documentation and visualizations using your preferred workflows in CAD, Revit,Rhino, Lumion, and Enscape.
An introductory course to the basics of using Topo Kit including the data rich geometries at the core of Topo Kit: topography, areas, and topographic features. You will also learn the basics of how to set the relationships between these geometries that will make your topographic design dynamically responsive to your design vision.
Topo Kit
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