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Does anyone know if it's possible to create a 3D dxf with OGR. I would like to assign our contour lines a z value and export them to dxf for some cad work.

PS I know FME can do this, however I would like to try and find a free solution and if possible do it in QGIS.

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Autocad map3d does this easily. – Brad Nesom Feb 7 '11 at 14:43
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Yeah but Autocad map isn't really free – Nathan W Feb 7 '11 at 22:13

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Easier then I thought (thanks to BenjaminGolder for the tip):

ogr2ogr -f "DXF" Contours.dxf Contours.TAB -zfield Height

Contours.TAB is the input MapInfo tab file.

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As far as I can tell this will work for contour lines, but not for true 3d-lines, which have a (x,y,z) coordinate for every point, and not one z value for every point of the line – johanvdw Sep 28 '11 at 14:12
I have been trying this in FWTools (2.4.7) without any luck. Has anyone had any luck? I am not sure if I am missing something in my GDAL? – Ryan Garnett Jul 5 '12 at 12:25
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Did you try in GRASS the v.out.dxf command? http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/v.out.dxf.html

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I haven't tried it yet, I will give it a go. I was hoping for a QGIS option also but I could make a script to automate it in GRASS to make it easier to do. – Nathan W Feb 9 '11 at 0:05
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I've never tried it, but it should be possible. The source code for the DXF driver writes Z values to dxf if the geometry is 2.5D, which (according to the source for the shapefile reader) is what you will have if the input shape has Z values.

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That sounds good. Next question, how do you create a shapefile with Z values. Say I have a column called Height, is there a easy way to make this the Z value. – Nathan W Feb 9 '11 at 0:08
Provided the shapefile is Z-aware, with ArcGIS, you can use a code block in the field calculator. I don't know how you would do it in Qgis. – Regan Sarwas Feb 9 '11 at 0:46
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in the ogr2ogr documentation, it appears that you can create a 3d shapefile using the -zfield argument and then specifying a field name that holds z values. gdal.org/ogr2ogr.html – BenjaminGolder Mar 25 '11 at 1:20
@BenjaminGolder That sounds good. I will give it a go. – Nathan W Apr 14 '11 at 7:14

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