Trimble Business Center

We have a complex footing and soil stabilization project that we would like to give the operators a visual aid for where the cuts will be before stabilization begins. We're thinking of using a simple hatching pattern to identify the cut areas and are wondering if anyone has a method that they've used to simplify the process. Currently the method we're thinking of is to create an isopach from the comparison surfaces, export and re-import the isopach to convert it from a cut/fill map to an actual surface, then generate a contour at the zero elevation. After that we'd go through and clean out any small or unneeded contour lines, create closed linestrings from the main contours to outline the cut areas and then manually create a hatch pattern by offsetting and trimming lines to the boundaries so they can be exported in a design file. 

This seems like a lot of work to define the cut areas and I'm wondering if: 1> Maybe there's a better way than hatching to provide a visual aid, or 2> There's a simpler work flow for creating the hatching to be shown on a rover or machine.

The picture shows the cut areas we'd like to define.

Thanks in advance

I don't think their is an easy way to do this on the machine control but you can pretty easily do this on both SCS900 and Siteworks. All you will need is the two surfaces you want to compare saved as two designs on the controllers.

See the video below for a walk through. 

I have been talking to the field development team on this and I have a couple of request to improve this capability.

@Joe Boelke let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions let me know and I will send them to the field development team. 

I think you are going to struggle here - SCS900 doesnt support Hatches or Solid Filled Lines today, and even Sitework now that it can read VCL files is converting the data it needs and I doubt can read solid fills either at this time. 

I m not sure what GCS900 can support in a SVD/SVL or Earthworks in DSZ format, but my gut tells me that they too will not have the support you are looking for.

I did look at hatching closed areas in BC-HCE and found a "Backdoor" to solid filling Areas with Holes in it - when you run Track Region Outline, if you name the area you are creating starting with two underscores then you can pick the bounding areas plus the holes and it will create you a boundary that cuts in and out of the main area to eliminate the holes from the fill pattern (on complex multi segment lines like contours you will find that it takes time when you create the outline and also when you select the outline thereafter - as they are computing the area each time the object is selected. What you could do however is the following

If you can create a grid of lines (Diagonal lines for example) close together across the entire job. You could then use the Clip command to break the lines when they cross over contours. Then you could color the lines based on the elevation range that they represent. That will create you an equivalent of a Hatch Pattern as real lines that you could transfer out to both GCS and SCS900 that would show up as a Color Map (of sorts at least).

You may also have issues with Color Mapping when you use colors other than the first 16 colors - but if you only have 5 or 6 colors and they are different colors rather than shades of colors you may be OK

Also with a large number of lines - you may get some performance issues in the field systems as well - so be aware of that also.

I know it is in the long term Roadmap for both products to add images in background - Site Pulse has this but not Siteworks or SCS900 nor GCS900 or Earthworks today as far as I know.

Alan

Great point Pat and thanks for jumping in here - I was thinking that they just wanted to shade the site and that isnt easy to do with what the field systems support in terms of fill patterns and hatch patterns, and you are right that SCS900 / Siteworks has these tools that the machines do not as far as I am aware

Alan

Thank you @Alan Sharp and @Pat L'Heureux, I just wanted to follow up and let you know that we loaded a second surface into a data collector and that pretty much did the trick. It would be nice to see that same functionality in a machine as well but getting it into the grade mans's hands was very helpful. A couple things I think would be nice to expand on this would be:

To have the choice to show the cut/fill colors as surface A-B or B-A. In our typical work flow we show proposed line work with a proposed surface as a primary design. In order to see the cuts properly and show the location on the project I needed to create a design that had proposed line work with an existing surface and then use a design with the proposed surface as the second surface design. I think this could add confusion to our field guys since they're not accustomed to using surface B as they're target grade or keeping track of which sites have designs of this nature or not. It would also eliminate the need for me to create redundant designs.

The other thing that would be nice is to be able to load a .tcf file as the color mapping in the data collector. Just to create consistency across printed cut/fill maps and whats on the screen of the controller.