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DEM conversion to .dae or other Sketchup-compatible format?

2017-04-25
2017-04-25
  • vovchyk_bratyk

    vovchyk_bratyk - 2017-04-25

    Hi,

    I am very new to SAGA but have gotten some good success using it for hydrologic modeling. Thank you for such an awesome free capability and hugely helpful forums.

    However I am looking for a simple tutorial or advice for another common workflow that I currently execute with a collection of proprietary (and extremely expensive) tools: converting DEMs to .dae models for use inside Sketchup.

    Is there a SAGA tutorial for doing something like this? The output could be either .dae or .ply as long as the .ply is ASCII (there is a working Sketchup plugin for importing .ply, but it only handles ASCII not binary).

    My generic workflow is (assuming I'm using something like SRTM as a base to hand-craft models upon):

    1. Identify and extract area of interest from SRTM cell
    2. Convert to TIFF
    3. Do whatever resampling I may want
    4. Reproject to UTM
    5. Export to TIN
    6. Convert TIN to .dae or .ply (ascii)

    Is such a thing possible in SAGA? I have done a fair amount of research on this and it seems that it's a bit of a unicorn. I'd be really interested in hearing from anyone who has conquered this.

    (I am also aware of the Qgis2three.js plugin for QGIS - on my heavy-lifting work PC, this will not work as our policy has localhost blocked.)

     
  • Volker Wichmann

    Volker Wichmann - 2017-04-25

    Hi,

    both formats are not handled by SAGA (we have a Collada exporter in-house, but that is not of help here), but I think Sketchup should also be able to handle STL files. So a workflow could be:

    ...
    5. TIN > Tools > Grid to TIN
    6. Import/Export > Shapes > Export TIN to Stereo Lithography File (STL)

    Maybe you like to give it a try,
    Volker

    --
    http://www.laserdata.at
    http://www.alp-s.at/cms/en/

     
    • vovchyk_bratyk

      vovchyk_bratyk - 2017-04-25

      Thank you Volker, I will give this a shot at home - at work, I use SAGA libraries that come with QGIS (2.14) and there is no Grid to TIN tool.

       

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