This tutorial guides you through the process of understanding and navigating surface definitions in design software. The article covers topics such as copying and deleting dependent objects, excluding certain elevations, setting maximum angles, and working with different types of break lines.
Key Insights
- The article elaborates on how to navigate to surface definitions within software by utilizing the tool space and accessing surface properties. It also explains how to manage dependent objects on the surface.
- The tutorial discusses various editing options like setting a maximum angle between the lines of a triangle, dealing with break lines, and excluding certain elevations. It provides a detailed explanation of each option's implications and uses.
- Lastly, the article explains different data and edit operations that users can perform on the surfaces, such as boundaries break lines, contour data, and smoothing and simplifying surfaces. It also explains how to recover deleted lines by unchecking them in the operations.
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In this video we're going to go ahead and look at some other surface definitions that we kind of glossed over in the previous video. We talked about surface definitions when we created our minimum triangle length.
We're going to go ahead and go back into where our definitions are in our surface properties by going over to the tool space, going to our surface, right clicking, and choosing surface properties. So once we're inside of our surface properties window we're going to navigate to the definitions tab and we have our surface definitions here in this window. I'm going to expand out build first and we'll go through these.
We have the options for copying, delete, deleted dependent objects. So these are dependent objects on your surface and whether or not you want to copy those objects into your surface. Exclude elevations less than, and if you have set to yes or no, whether or not you'll exclude those elevations and what that elevation number is right here.
We have exclude elevations greater than and then a number for what elevations you would like to exclude above a certain point. Then you have your option for a maximum angle. So whether or not you want to have a maximum angle between the lines of a triangle.
You have our maximum triangle length which we set to 100. We have convert proximity break lines to standard. If you have proximity break lines that were inserted from something else not just a proximity break line that you created but it would take those proximity break lines from somewhere else and yes convert them to standard or no do not convert them to standard.
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So since we're not working with proximity break lines this doesn't really matter to us. Allow crossing break lines you can have it set to yes or no and depend on if you have it set to yes or no you get the option for elevation to use. If you set it to yes and allow break lines to cross.
So more often than not you don't want to allow break lines to cross because each individual break line has a set elevation. Now you may have break lines that if you had had a survey those break lines where they crossed would have had a shared elevation. So you may want to allow break lines like if you were having someone survey two streams and you have one stream crossing another stream or joining together then you might have a crossing break line and so you would want to allow those crossing break lines to happen and now you would choose how you want to assign an elevation at that crossing.
So whether it's use first break line elevation intersection use last break line elevation intersection or use average break line elevation intersection. So that just depends on what you know about the break lines that you're going to allow to cross and whether or not you want to use a first last or an average. So I'm going to go ahead and set this to no and then we're going to go ahead and minimize build and we're going to look at our data operations and so this is what your data that you're allowed to add into the surfaces.
So boundaries break lines contour data DEM files point files point groups drawing objects survey queries and figure survey queries. So from here we're going to minimize data
operations and we're going to expand edit operations. So inside edit operations what edits are you allowed to do to your surface use and add points use delete points use modify points add line delete line swap edge minimize flat surface smooth surface paste surface raise and lower surface import land xml import 10 move point transform by use simplify use extrapolate surface.
We have no set to use simplify this is not an option for us to change simply because we don't have information inside of here that we can simplify our surface so that's why this is grayed out right now. So moving on from here I'm going to minimize this and what you'll notice inside of our operations is that when we went and deleted all of those lines they were copied in as operations that were done to our surface. So with all of these operations if you for some reason deleted some lines that you didn't want to delete you can just uncheck it and then it will add those lines back into the drawing.
If for some reason you ever delete lines and you didn't want to delete it you want to add them back in you just check that box and the deletion of those lines would come back into the drawing. So I'm going to click okay and I'm going to go ahead and save my drawing and then in the next video we're actually going to create a simple surface off to the side to do some additional modifications to and we're going to talk about how we have surface to surface interaction when we're doing pasting and that kind of stuff.
