Pavement Model in FreeCAD

[bobH2]

I am still pretty much a novice in FreeCAD but I needed to "quickly" model my pavement. I managed to get it done with sketches and the Part Workshop (probably not the best way).

When you open the project, you will see a picture of part of the property from Google overlaid with the model of the new pavement. The idea was to exagerate the bumps and big puddle areas of the new pavement and demonstrate how the new sloping ran too much water into those puddle areas. We only had a bare minimum of measurements but it worked!

I don't know if this was the best appproach. If anyone wants to get into designing a workbench for this sort of thing, what would really be good would be:
1. Some quick way of entering a point cloud.
2. Automatic tessellation of all the points.
3. Some easy way to adjust the height multiplier in the spreadsheet with a slider control.

Maybe there is another workbench already available?

I used FreeCAD 0.20.1 but it seems to open okay with 0.19.4

Thanks,
Bob.

[thschrader]

...
I don't know if this was the best appproach. If anyone wants to get into designing a workbench for this sort of thing, what would really be good would be:
1. Some quick way of entering a point cloud.
2. Automatic tessellation of all the points.
3. Some easy way to adjust the height multiplier in the spreadsheet with a slider control.
...

I think your approach is straight forward, I like it, good job. The work has to be done...
You can smooth the surface and reduce the number of surfaces by using interpolation curves (install curves-wb)
and the surface-wb.

your point 1:
open point-wb and read your asc/txt file with the xyz-point coordinates.

point 2:
maybe with the reengineering-wb or trails-wb. But this is a tricky task.

point 3:
no idea...

How have you done the measurement? GPS? Or "by hand"?

Regards Thomas

See also
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... da#p651799
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... ae289575da
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... da#p316434

pavement_smooth.JPG (76.1 KiB) Viewed 1268 times

[thschrader]

file with smooth surface:

Pavement_smooth.fcstd

(961.92 KiB) Downloaded 41 times

[bobH2]

Thomas,
The data was gathered by my pavement engineer using a theodolite, measuring tape, and pole. Took an entire afternoon but I think they got it more or less accurately. It would have cost more, but probably could have found someone to do it with a 3D laser scanner or LIDAR and gathered more data points.

Your smoothed out model does seem to represent the actual pavement. It is a much better visualization even with the limited data.

Yes, it turns out there is a point cloud workbench. To provide a multiplier, maybe the source of the point cloud could actually be saved with the actual point cloud then saved again with an exaggerated point cloud and reimported into FreeCAD. At least that might work.

Thanks,
Bob.