Hello TBC’ers! This week’s tip is a walkthrough of a general surface workflow. When working with spatial data, it may be necessary to alter your data from imagery or point clouds into a 3D topography made by a contiguous triangular mesh. This altered form of the original data enables new tools and workflows which can generate additional insight into the dataset!
1. To begin this workflow, click on the “Surfaces” tab on the top ribbon (1A) and then click “Create Surface” (1B).
2. This will bring up the “Create Surface” pane where you can decide how you want your new surface to be created. These parameters include the name, surface classification, color, measured date, and the input data you want to make the new surface from.
3. For this example, the new surface will be called “Test”, be unclassified, be green, and will consist of the entire dataset so the new surface will cover the entire input point cloud.
4. Click apply at the bottom of the “Create Surface” pane to generate the new surface and keep the pane up, or click “OK” to create the new surface and close the pane. The new surface will appear in the color you chose, and may be hard to see with the imagery or point cloud still visualized. To get a better view of the surface, go to the “View Filter Manager” button (4A) and close all options besides the new surface section (4B).
5. With only the new surface visualized, it is much easier to explore in the Plan or 3D Views.
6. With your new surface created, it is time to generate a “Surface Info Report”. To do this, in the same “Surfaces” tab from step 1, go to the view section and click on “Surface Info Report” (6A).
7. This will bring up the “Surface Information Report” pane. Here you can select which surface the report will be generated from (7A), slope and elevation ranges (7B), and any surface warnings (7C). When the desired parameters are selected, click “OK” at the bottom of the pane and the new report will be generated and automatically pop-up.
8. That is it! With the report generated, you have access to new and insightful deliverables about the original dataset.
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