Note: Since October 2018, Google doesn't provide free access to scan and import terrain data.
A new command to scan and import terrains is available since Beta VIII: https://youtu.be/l4s3H-Y78Vo
Lands Design is a software product for designing gardens, green spaces, and landscapes that runs as a Rhino plug-in.
Often the user can not dispose of the topographic data of the terrain on which is going to work. Lands makes it possible to obtain the elevation data directly from the Google Earth window. Lands performs a scan of the elevation with respects to sea level of the terrain surface visible on Google Earth window and generates a representation based on section curves.
Lands uses a popular terrain generation algorithm based on Delaunay Triangulation.
You can either build the surface of the terrain using the triangulation faces directly or adjust a grid to the form obtained after the triangulation process, with the purpose of obtaining a smooth surface. When smoothing the surface with a grid, you can control the resolution of the grid, indicating the size of its cells, as such as smoothness and simplification parameters.
