Trimble Business Center

If we have one big surface and we want to separate smaller areas as own surfaces without deleting, is it possible? I know that it is possible to delete areas from surface models but in this case, we just want to separate them, not delete.

-Mikael

If you have the points, triangles or lines that the surface is created from, it would be easy enough to just draw polygons around the areas you want to separate out as smaller surfaces and using the polygon select, just add those that are within the polygon and create new smaller surfaces.  If you don't have those and just have the surface, you could always export the surface out as a DXF file, and then re-import back into Business Center.  That would give you triangles from the large surface, that you could then use to create smaller surfaces from polygon areas.  

Thanks Brian,

I thought that something easy like this is possible. I knew the dxf export import way, but never thought just to draw polygons, modify the height on the surface and make own surfaces from those. In addition, we can make empty areas to the original surface with surface boundaries -tool.

-Mikael

For most workflows I suggest that you select just the objects needed for a surface and make independent surfaces.  This makes them as small as possible and allows you to control them independently.  You can always select several surfaces to make a larger surface.  An object can also be in more than one surface.

You can also run the Macro command "Offset Surface" to copy a portion of a surface to work with.

An alternate method is to add multiple boundaries to a surface.  In the below example I have added three circles as surface boundaries.  Because the circles are 2d additional points are created where each one crosses a triangle line. (This adds more triangles, takes more memory and slows computations.)  In order to show just the 3 areas, all of the other triangles are hidden.  What this means is that the surface is just as large as before, you just can't see a portion.  If you want to see the hidden triangles then change the RGB color values of the surface to be 100, 101 and 102.  You will now see the true extents of the surface as shown in the last image.

Whenever you calculate volumes or slice a surface the hidden part of the surface still has to be calculated.  This typically slows down  the computations compared to just making smaller areas with just the objects needed.

Hopefully this gives you a few more ideas so you can see what works best for you.

tim

Thanks Tim!

This was helpful!

-Mikael