Trimble Business Center

Wondering if anybody would have an idea on this.

I have a site where one of the roads is a closed loop, this is not uncommon, however I would like to be able to make the surface a little cleaner for the machine drivers (and for my mild raging OCD). Is there a simple way to create an internal boundary or cut the centre from the loop.

I have managed to create a nice clean roads only layout so far other than in this section by playing with the surface properties.

Good question and one I'd like to know too. The solution I have used is breaking the street lines and create a very small (0.05') channel through to the enclosed area. Then I just trim out all the internal triangles. Time consuming and trimming needs to be done every time the surface is rebuilt. There must be a better method.

There are a couple of  ways to do this - one is a pretty neat trick

Could you send me the VCE file and I will record a video of how to do it using your data as I don't have an example that I can readily find to do it on.

What I would do is assign a "Null Texture" to the surface - i.e. use the Add Surface Texture command to add a Surface Texture to the areas you want to "exclude"  When asked for the Material don't select one. The name of the Texture you place can be anything but I use Null Texture. This has the effect of painting the Triangles up to the edges of the roads with "No Material" which is the same as placing a Hole in the Model. The Null Texture will stop as soon as it hits a Breakline with the Sharp and Texture property or a breakline that is created by a Corridor model (should apply to all your breaklines in the roads.

The hidden triangles are actually still there - they just cannot be seen and when you export a TTM or PRO or SVD/SVL or DSZ file the hole will be present in the surface model. The attached video shows the same thing for a large rail job where they had the same issue where the source data was 3D Faces from a DWG file - the video shows the process. The hidden triangles can be shown if you change the color of the surface model to have an RGB color of 100, 101, 102

You could also use "Track Region" if you have linework for the roads, to define the areas where you want Holes and then apply the linestrings created using Track Region as Surface Boundaries - note that you will need a boundary around the outside of the project if you want to place inner boundaries to make holes in the model. I am just not 100% sure whether track region will pick up on embedded breaklines from corridors or not as I doubt you can select them, so you would likely have to Explode the corridors to create the linework unless you have the lines as CAD lines from the source data.

The Texture method works very well though.

Alan

I'd be happy to send you the .vce, what's the best way to send it? Fair warning, the thing is a mess of CAD and PDF imports unless you use a view filter.

Here is the Video - Could of sworn that I had recorded this one before - evidently not - so I recorded it now to capture this valuable workflow process.

Happy Modeling !

Alan

Great little tip to know, good way to clean up drawings.

The surface texture trick does not seem to work when you apply it to a corridor that is part of another surface. In your "master surface" you will also get a void as well. Is there a work around for this? This is a pretty simple center island, but sometimes will we get fancy detention ponds in the middle of the cul-de-sacs that we need to add to the master surface. 

The corridor in question is called "Clover Lane".  The overall surface is called "Finished Design".

The tear drop style Cul-De-Sac is a very common style in our work area. It creates a few issue. One of them being that you cannot use the intersection tool to model the intersection because the alignment parallel merges back into itself, which does not meet the intersection criteria.

Thank you!

Creating a surface from the "Master Surface" and clean up that surface should not modify your orginal "Master Surface" 

Are you saying that you want the Void in the Corridor Surface but not in the Final Surface of which the Corridor model with the void is a part? If that is what you are requesting I question why it should nit be there in both - if it is right for the master final surface why is it wrong for the Corridor model on it's own?

When you add the Corridor Surface to the master surface, triangles that are Nulled Out carry as Nulled Out because that is what you told them to do. If you want to do what you are asking, I would create a second Corridor Surface for Finished Grade and Null the triangles in one and not the other and then add the one without Nulled Triangles to your Final Surface if you want the center of the island filled out. That solves the problem because you are really saying that you have two variants of the same surface you want to work with, that are both linked to the same Corridor Model but will be used differently.

Alan

I see what you are saying. I think it is because I was treating the the corridor as just a cleanup of the corridor surface from ep to ep or should to shoulder and then adding everything else after; slopes, ditches, ponds, etc. There is no reason it cannot be added that I can think of, at least at this moment. Like you mention, I could always create a separate surface if need be for something such as a grading surface.

Thanks for the feedback!

I usually create an outside boundary, and then closed lines representing any inside boundaries I want.  I then use the "Surface Boundaries" command to create the hole.  It also works great for having two surfaces in different areas combined into one that do not bridge across.

Tim McClannahan raised a good point by email on this that I thought I would share here also

1. When you have a surface, and you apply a surface boundary or boundaries to it, all of the original triangles of the surface are still there they are simply "Nulled Out" and hidden. That means they still have to be processed when you do Takeoffs or volumes etc. and they still take up memory and disk space etc.
2. If you first trim the outside edges or apply Max Edge Length to reduce the number of triangles and then create a DTM Edge Breakline to constrain the model from recreating those erroneous triangles the actual model will be smaller and faster to process.
3. If you have multiple boundaries (creating islands or holes in a surface), then you have to use Surface Boundaries to achieve that, and the triangles between the islands or across the holes will still be there but again they are nulled out and are not displayed. If you want to see all triangles (nulled or not) then if you change the surface color to RGB 100, 101, 102 then they will all be displayed to you.

Sometimes we see projects where the project area has been constrained using a surface boundary, however the size of the surface is sometimes as much as 50% larger and 50% unused triangles - this will have a negative effect on processing times for Volumes, Takeoff etc. so be aware of the difference between a Surface constrained by a Surface Boundary and one constrained by eliminating triangles and adding a Surface Edge Breakline. Note also if you do not have islands or holes to contend with, you do not need to have a Surface Boundary at all, a Surface Edge Breakline or connected breaklines around the edge of a model suffices to constrain the surface.

Thanks Tim for raising the bar here

Alan

That is something good to know.