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 Best way to make surfaces independent of point clouds

Jacob Morris's profile image
Jacob Morris posted 07-29-2025 14:05

I use TBC to track dozens of active mine sites.  We fly them at least quarterly and i need to track site progress for various projects.  As the sites progress, I don't need the old scans but I do need the surfaces I generate from them to be able to calculate volumes against.

I am running out of storage, so I started to delete some older scans and it seems that surfaces generated from the point clouds also disappear.  

Is there a way I can make the surface independent from the point cloud so that I can clear out some space?

ian bissonnette's profile image
ian bissonnette

one option might be to export xml of the triangles. pretty sure you can do this without having all the associated points but not 100% sure. then reimport the surface from the xml. if the triangles are dense then you might still have large files. 

Thomas Tomsu's profile image
Thomas Tomsu

I usually export surfaces in the Trimble format "TTM", they seem to be lighter than xml. Since it is native to TBC, it holds all breakline and triangle data that you originally had.

Jacob Morris's profile image
Jacob Morris

So Thomas,

Your workflow is:

Import point cloud > Make Surface > Export TTM > Delete Surface > Import TTM?

Thanks,

Jake

ian bissonnette's profile image
ian bissonnette

long term you will be better off with a new tbc project for each dataset. then you can reference one into the other. 

it is just impossible to have endless data in one project. 

tbc referencing is not as clean as cad. but it can work. 

Thomas Tomsu's profile image
Thomas Tomsu

Workflow should be:

  1. Create new TBC Project for every date surveyed
  2. Import Point Cloud
  3. Create surface
  4. Export TTM file of surface
  5. Create " Master" TBC Project  and import all surfaces for comparing