Exporting terrain contour

Hi everyone, this is my first post on this forum :slight_smile:

I am a 3D newbie (but trying to learn!). I have been tasked with incorporating a 3D map/terrain contour into a design in Photoshop CC 2014.

Here is my blender problem: The terrain is given to me looks great when loaded in blender. The points that make up the contour lines are joined … but opening it in Photoshop or Meshlab, there is simply a point cloud (which meshlab can display but photoshop cannot render).

Here is what it looks like in blender


Here is what it looks like in meshlab (setting it to display wireframe shows nothing):


How can I convert this “point cloud” (I am probably using the wrong terminology) to export an OBJ file with nice contour lines?

If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it.

Here is a link to the blender file if anyone is interested in looking at it (about 3m in size):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9t66fu9oncfdh64/cont.blend?dl=1

there’s a script that does it

Thanks Modron. That got me 90% of the way there. Unfortunately, as I should probably have expected from any tool or process, it generates irregularities that the engineers at work would complain about.

I also have a solid mesh of the terrain, are there any ways to convert a 3d mesh into contour lines? I have Google and Searched the forums but I can only find contours -> terrain not the other way around.


Another is http://blendscript.blogspot.com/2012/08/laser-slicer.html - complete addon to get slices for laser cutting. It has some more checks on what’s produced. Produces contours and svg file with shifted single contour set.

Thanks eppo. That looks perfect, unfortunately I cannot get it to work in Blender 2.71 on Mac OS X 10.10.1. It just hangs there and nothing is written to the SVG file. I have left it for hours and decreased the resolution (increased slice height) and it still hangs. I have no idea why!

Laser Slicer addon was hanging on that svg part here on Linux too - i commented it out and it was done in minute or so. Use the script part from thread i linked like you see here in image: copy- paste into Text editor window new text and click Run. If you have millions of verts in that mesh you will have to wait much longer and process wont tell you much.