Editable Terrain

Hey Lucas:  Grzegorz is correct, assuming that you want to directly edit triangles.  I would suggest that you are not well served in doing so however.  Consider this:

1. You disable rules
2. You monkey with the terrain to do whatever (deleting the triangles in concave corners is most common need)
3. All is well right?
4. Then someone adds more survey data
5. What do you do? re-enable the rules thus destroying your edits?  Make a separate terrain model and then merge it with the original edited one?

Yeah, I know. Wait until the survey is 100% then edit.  But when is the last time you had a project that was ever "finished"? All to often we are continuing to add survey data right up to and sometimes during construction.

It is far better in the rules based world of OpenRoads to edit rules instead. Consider the most common need for a surveyor to edit the terrain model (remove triangles from the concave corners.) Here's what you do:

1. Process survey as normal
2. Oops, I have a bad corner.
3. Draw a smartline along the corner, snapping the surveyed points
4. Add the smartline as a boundary element
5. Continue processing survey as normal.

The same process can be used to apply a boundary to the DTM. 

Deactivate surface, trim triangles, create graphic boundary, unlock surface, rebuild surface from survey data, apply boundary......

Sounds like a lot of steps but much better in the long term not having the surface deactivated.

That is a poor work flow.  Missed a couple, whoops do it again.  More survey data.  Do it all again.

Workflow in civil3d.  Download data, edit surface as needed.  Pickup survey data, rinse and repeat as needed.

It's a much better workflow but as with a lot of workflows the designers of the program don't use it in practice.  They just move on.

The downloading of survey data should be to download the points and breaklines and apply the rules, then get out of the way and let me edit and do my job.  If pickup survey is downloaded then apply the rules when I download that, then get out of the way and let me do my job.

We only download csv file format. So deactivation of the rules seems ok.  I've not found that the terrain is tied back anyway.  If you change a code in the text file I've not found a way that the design file changes except to delete the data from ORD and redownload.

Most of the workflow is right click options. Once the survey data is cleaned up in the survey database there isn't much to do at the rebuild phase. I only apply the deactivation once in the life cycle of the survey. Once you have the boundary introduced it can be grip edited as needed. We also import CSV files as well as FDOT survey data for design surveys. I don't find it cumbersome to work in iterations but to each his own.....I'll get out of your way and let you do your job.

Most of the workflow is right click options. Once the survey data is cleaned up in the survey database there isn't much to do at the rebuild phase. I only apply the deactivation once in the life cycle of the survey. Once you have the boundary introduced it can be grip edited as needed. We also import CSV files as well as FDOT survey data for design surveys. I don't find it cumbersome to work in iterations but to each his own.....I'll get out of your way and let you do your job.