Sliding contours for even better terrain planning
- Nye releases
First we released beautiful and detailed nationwide contour maps with intervals of 50 cm and 2.5 m. Now we introduce a whole new contour map that allows you to select the contour interval that suits your purpose and scale.
Check out the new contour map where it is possible to interactively choose the contour interval. Simply slide through the intervals and stop when you have found a map that suits your purpose and scale. This is a follow-up on the January release of nation-wide contour lines.
The video below shows how smoothly it works.
Slide through the contour intervals and choose the one suits your purpose and scale.
"With the new update, we wanted to make sure that contours adapt to all kinds of terrains and use cases", explains Otfried Cheong, expert of geometric algorithms at SCALGO. "With the two choices we offered originally, we could see that there were issues when the terrain is very steep or when working on large-scale assessments. Now the user can choose the most suitable option."
Currently, the contours are based on the two maps that were originally released in January 2023 (the 50 cm and 2.5 m contour intervals). This means that contours with a 10-meter interval are generated by only keeping every fourth level in the 2.5-meter map. Similarly, the 1-meter interval is generated by only keeping every second level in the 50-centimeter map.
Over time, as we update the contour maps in each country, we will add support for more intervals that are fine tuned to the specific scale that they represent. For some countries we will also add contour intervals smaller than 50 centimeters.
And another great improvement is, that when downloading contour lines, the user now gets exactly the contours that are specified by the slider setting. So if you need contours for your CAD project, you simply select the scale you need and then you download.
Go and have a look and let us know what you think!
