Made a bit of start.
I sketched out the contour lines from various maps I could find of the place. There was a bit of guess work in some places as I could not find a map with all of the contours in isolation. Maybe there is a DEM lidar model of it somewhere but if so then I don't have one.
Contours1.png
There has been a few posts I have done about this but its my usual method. I clean up the contour lines and fill them in a zebra pattern. Then you have to make sure that the bands don't overlap at all and also that the rough widths of them are about even. You can do this by blurring it and using the colour curves feature of a paint app to adjust the contours to thicken or thin them up. Once happy, whack the contrast up to max to make it just two colour and then use the fill tool to fill in each band.
Contours2.png
Once you have a nice set of zebra stripes count from the the top of the map to the lowest point. That for me was about 30 of them. So I chose to go up in steps of 8 greyscale amounts so that it goes from pure white down to nearly black.
Contours3.png
Then a smooth in paint app softens up the wedding cake effect.
HeightMap1.png
That in 3D looks like this - which basically looks about right at first glance.
3DModel1.png
Its still got some ripples in it because smoothing in a paint app is still done with each pixel in a byte. But ill smooth it a bit more later on in my 3D app which keeps the height in floating point format so it will get rid of them. Once I have done that I will scale it so that the heights are real world based so that the Tor is 157m high.
Before I start making cuts into paper I think ill start with some circles and do a variety of gaps and see how it handles it. The rough pattern is something like this:
RoughCutPattern1.png
So the idea is that as you pull up on the top circle then the contours split apart and are joined up by the tabs not cut. Each pair of contours will make a diamond shape and multiple layers will make a diamond pattern a bit like a wire fence. Hopefully with enough cuts then it will stretch apart and not deform the shape too much. I have to find cuts so that the shape can pull up and therefore increase its surface area whilst at the same time the structure came from a flat sheet of paper which is not changing its surface area so its filling in the new area with air. But it might pull in a bit.
There are some materials which increase in volume when stretched. These have a negative Poisson ratio and are known as Auxetic materials. What I need to do is cut the paper is such a way as to have a zero Poisson ratio or hope that with thin enough cuts it can get close to that. I am kind of expecting that I need to make some bits of it have close to zero and some have negative and then it will stretch up. So yeah not sure how that is going to work out !
Most of these negative ratios depend on cutting a zig zag lines so that when pulled it uncompresses like a spring and expands.
So the first thing to cut are some circles and see if I can get them into a cone shape and whether the sides pull in or out.
If that works out then I think its just a case of applying it to the 3D model in areas with cut density based on the 3D model slope.
