Happy September TBC’ers! This week we discuss a project setting which can greatly reduce the processing time required for volume calculations between large surfaces. Often the need for a fast rough volume arises. This is how you do that!
Here I have two (small) surfaces between which I wish to generate an Earthwork Report and calculate a volume. The green (Plan View & 3D View) surface is the Original Ground, and the purple (Plan View2 & 3D View2) surface is a gravel pile.
Go to Project Settings.
Computations > Surface. Under General,Volume computation: The default setting is Track All Triangles.
Using Track All Triangles will provide the most accurate volume for your surfaces, but is quite computationally intensive. For doing rough work, or rough volumes where time is of the essence, change this setting to Do Not Track Breaklines.
Using Do Not Track Breaklines will reduce the computation time by up to 95% in our tests. This large time savings was when two dense surfaces created from point clouds were being used for the volume computation, such as UAS or laser scanning data. For a detailed explanation of what these settings do differently, take a look at TBC Help (accessed by pressing F1 in TBC) and search for “do not track breaklines”, or “track all triangles”.
To perform a volume calculation, generate an Earthwork Report under the reports command in the Surfaces Ribbon.
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