Trimble Business Center

Hi gang,

I have a question about the “Surface Information” Report.

I have a corridor surface of a channel.  I need to get the slope areas of the side slopes and the bottom of the channel.  I am using the “Surface Information” report, but I want to limit it by AOI (phase).  I can’t see a way to do that other than to create new surfaces that are broken up into the different areas.

#SurfaceInformationReport

Jen

You have a couple of options here

1) Run the Corridor Earthwork Report with multiple boundaries - the Surface Areas will be reported in the tables for each boundary selected - each boundary is reported in a separate Tab - highlight the top of the Excel column in the report to compute the Total Areas (as they are listed by Station Interval and not summarized at the bottom), or just add a sum formula to the areas that you need. Make sure that your Template has just those instructions that you want the areas for assigned to a Material Layer (all material layers are reported for Surface Areas). The corridor will need an Original Ground Surface so it can compute Volumes - just discard the volume data if you dont need it.

2) You can run an Earthwork Report between the surface and an ELevation or another surface and surface areas will be reported - you should change your Corridor Surface to have the Property of the Materiual Layer you want to report the areas for - you can select multiple boundaries and the surface areas for your selected material layer will be reported by boundary (for Cut and Fill Areas).

3) I thought that if you assigned Surface Textures to a Surface that when you ran the Surface Information Report it would give you the areas by Surface Texture - however I need to look at that again this afternoon because that doesnt appear to be working in 4.11 today - maybe that got taken out or got broken a while back and noone has reported it but I am sure that it used to work (at least for normal surfaces but maybe not a corridor surface - I will come back on this one later.

Alan

I just tested it on a normal Surface and a Corridor Surface using Surface Textures and that does not appear to work currently as it used to - I have someone looking at it this afternoon to see if that can be resurrected in the software - it has been a while since I tried that personally. Will let you know what we find out.

Alan

Many thanks!

I have a work around, so it is not a rush.

Jen

We just looked again and having saved the Project (not sure if that was the issue) when you have applied Surface Textures to regions of a surface it will report those areas in the Surface Information Report.

To take a Corridor and break it at MOT Area boundaries, you will need to create Linestrings with the Sharp and Texture Boundary Property at the Stations that you want to break out the reports into - then you will need to add those linestrings to the Corridor surface model in order for the texturing to be limited. Note also that each Node line in the Corridor Model automatically acts as a Texture Boundary - so you may get multiple areas that you have to add together to get what you need.

The break out of the data is on Page 2 of the Surface Information report

Note - that for each MOT Area you will need to apply a different Material / texture (Call them MOT 1, MOT 2, MOT 3, MOT 4 etc.) and give each a different color or Texture file (either works) then you will get a report of Plan and Surface Area by Material and it is not sub divided between the Template Nodes which I think is what you want

As a bi product you get a Color Coded or Textured model which is Awesome :-)!!!

Alan

This is a task I also need to do frequently, as do others within my company.  I feel like the software is missing a "measure area" command.  A command that would allow the user to simply click around forming a closed polygon to get the area in a unit that is selectable within the command (square mm, square cm, square m, hectares, etc., etc.), with a further option to select a surface and get the surface area within the selected or digitized polygon(s).  As I am writing this I am thinking that it might be easier to modify the "area/length/count" report to give a selectable option to report surface areas within the selected polygons and a selected reference surface.

I hope this finds you well.  Good day! @Alan Sharp

Wayne

To measure Areas you can use the Create Polygon command - at the PUG class two weeks ago I showed a 2D Takeoff workflow and digitizing areas off plans was a big part of that - I can send you the Training Guide if that would help. Any Polygon Area has properties that can be viewed - one of the Properties is Plan Area. The Areas are also reported as a part of the Area Length Count report as you mentioned in your note above.

If you then use the "Change Elevation Command" on those Polygon Areas and set the Elevation by Surface and select a target surface, this effectively elevates the Polygons to your surface. I then use Add / Remove Surface Members to add them to the Surface Model and change the polygon property for Surface Sharpness to be Sharp and Texture Boundary.

Once you have done that you can then use the Surface Texture command to apply a Surface Texture of the same or different types to the areas you have defined (defining them with different textures will report the Surface Areas out separately - defining them with the same texture will not break out the Surface areas separately - it aggregates the same Texture areas together). Once textures are assigned you can run the Surface Information Report to report out the different surface areas of the surface model

I have also generated some Custom Reports that provide a Quick and Easy to read Surface Area Report based on this Surface Information Report that can then be pasted into Drawings and Cut Fill Maps etc.

If you use the Label Tables - you can place a Table on a drawing that has the Areas and Perimeters of selected area objects (2D). That also labels the Areas themselves with the Name, Area and Perimeter values automatically.

While I agree that we could write a single command to Trace Area (2D or 3D) and at the end of the process provide Properties or a Label that can be applied to a drawing and that an ALC report could pick those up - we can already generate 2D or 3D Area Reports and Tables and Labels using the current Tools. If I get time later today I will record a short video of this as a reference. 

If you would like my custom Menu Ribbon, my Training Guide for 2D Takeoff please email me and I can share them with you (I will upload a package here also shortly)

Alan