What do you do if a survey crew takes a lot of isolated patches of topo areas. Think, maybe, for quadrants of urban intersection corners - with no shots (and no intent) to connect these "terrain islands".
Out of the box (fieldbook) it will want to create a single terrain from all the points. Max triangle length can help trim out bad triangles, but still remnants of nastiness.
Another example is widened exteriors in corridors.
Is there an easy/automated way to get individual terrains for each island which can then be added and managed in a Complex Terrain? Complex Terrains work nicely with a base terrain that surrounds all the islands...
Graphic filter with fences/selection sets for semi-automated creating of individual terrains is a semi-automatic solution. Is there better?
Asking for a group of friends...
-jeff
I have worked with a lot of surveyors and sometimes they can be a stubborn as structural engineers! Both of my children spent number of years working on field crews and my son is now a party chief. My daughter worked both office and field before moving on to other higher-level CAD/GIS positions. I mentioned my children because I would ask their opinions on new ideas before making them at work. They were much more willing to try different things if the payoff is worth making the change. The office staff are like old dogs, and these are new tricks. It is surprising that even though they recognize my expertise, they will reject recommended workflows and other related suggestions, even when we pointed out that these had been successfully implemented at other firms and were recognized as improvements, not just changes..
We do a lot of retrofit projects where we are redoing curbs and sidewalks so we often have strips of survey data on different sides of the roads or different quadrants. The only way to really make those work is separate terrain elements in one or multiple files.
I had experience in Civil 3D where we used the terrain from survey live and someone removed an essential breakline. Since then, we published our terrain to LandXML and used it to create the "live" terrain. A similar approach in Open Roads might be in order. And I believe you can have survey not automatically create terrain elements for the last few releases.
Charles (Chuck) Rheault CADD Manager
MDOT State Highway Administration
Ran across this recently that may add some value to the discussion here. Don Lee describes the use of a placeholder within a complex terrain (he refers to as a named Null surface) that can be replaced and added to later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qAV0usnjt0 In other parts of the video series he does describe the use of terrain filters to define corridor breaklines and how those can be stitched into another terrain.
Bentley Accredited Road Designer | Bentley Accredited Road Modeler
colliersengineering.com
Jeff,
I agree with Mary. Best practice would be to isolate the raw imported data and bring each area of data into separate fieldbooks. If thats a hastle you can create a selection set of a single area of topo data and then do the following:
- hold the shift key on your keyboard and do not let go. If the shift key doesn’t work it might be the ctrl key.
- right click on “Fieldbook”….not the actual project fieldbook, but the one labeled fieldbook directy above the project fieldbook
- select create terrain model from selection set
- once the terrain is created then you can let go of the shift or ctl key!
Hope this helps!
yes, clever bit of trickery there with The Don Lee Method. I think you'd get the same results, though, as if you were complexing to an existing surface (the "islands" will want to touch without manual intervention).
looks like that is the consensus. thanks, Chris!