Trimble Business Center

Is there any way to create a cutting plane view parallel to a linestring? I have a point cloud where the median of the highway has a stretch of guardrail against each direction of traffic. I need to get rid of the guardrail in the point cloud for earthwork analysis purposes. I have linework for that existing guardrail. Is there any way to utilize that linework to create a cutting plane that is a few feet wide that will help me isolate the guardrail? It is too hard to do it in cross-section view because of the length of the project and the varying profile of the road. What can I do?

Thanks,

Adam

When using Cutting Plane View - I would use the Perpendicular to alignment mode and then set your intervals to say 5' - this will create you a set of preset slices that in the Cutting plane view you can step through - in the cutting plane view you can specify a "Depth of Field or Thickness - there I would use say 5' if my interval was 5' or I would set my interval to 2.5' and use 2.5' depth of field - that way you see all of the point cloud data between the current slice and the next slice - then use polygon select to take out the Guard Rail - and then step to the next section and repeat. When you have selected the data using polygon select you likely want to add to a Point Cloud Region called Junk or Guard Rail etc - so that you keep the data but remove it from the Point Cloud that you are trying to clean up.

The other options are to use the 3D View and Polygon Select - that is how I would normally do this - the Polygon Select once started in 3D View freezes the plane of the 3D View while you are selecting - you can still zoom in and out and pan but just not rotate - this is pretty effective at removing this type of data since you can rotate around till you get a good view to make your selections from. If you find that there is data behind the view that you want to keep, then use the Limit Box to restrict the depth of data visible before you make your Polygon selection - this is a 3D version of Cutting Plane View.

I have recorded some videos of this and made posts previously that I will try to find the link and post it shortly

Hope this helps - let me know how you get on - if you share the data somehow, I can record you a video tomorrow on this

Alan

I think the biggest problem is that I have 3 miles of guardrail to get rid of. 5' intervals would take way too long. I wanted to have a way to look at the guardrail longitudinally so I could select the guardrail a lot quicker and without losing ground data.

I think what I'll do is just offset the guardrail line 1' on either side, create a boundary out of it and use the macro to select by boundary. It's only 2 feet so when I go to create my surface it shouldn't matter much, it'll just connect triangles through that empty space. That should take care of the guardrail and it won't cost me too long. 

That will work

Alan

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 10:37 PM abower@blythedevelopment.com <

Here is a link - not exactly what you are doing but similar approach - I also have another exercise that does something similar

https://community.trimble.com/message/12249-point-cloud-clean-up#comment-12322 

Alan