Smoothing surface

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone.

I am going to describe my question, even I have contact with customer support, but I didnt get the answer that I need, maybe because there is not a function for that or because I didnt exprese properly.

What I would like to do it is a kind of grading, but not totally flat and regular. I think I should transform the surface in a grill and then in every point modify the elevation in order to get a surface more smooth, so this way we will remove small hills and depressions. For example, if there are points which are 3 or 4 meters over the overage elevation. Reduce the elevation in these point around 1 meter for 3 and 1 and something for 4 meters proportional to how high or low is according the overage elevation. 

So, this way I will get the volumes of land and it is drawn the areas where I will have to remove or put lands, to becomes in a flatter surface. (example in PDF file)

I attach you a screenshot (section view file) which represents a sección of 2 different surfaces. 

I am waiting for your response, thank you in advance.

Thank you in advance. Best regards.

[Anonymous]

This is a good question, I'm not sure I have any easy answer for you. 

My first thought is. If you have points that are high and points that are low and it is truly random, then I would suspect that all of the points combined would actually represent the average surface. In other words, if the technology you used to create the ground elevation data was used for all the points, then one may be able to deduce that there may be an equal number of high and low points. Therefore any surface analysis executed will produce the same results as a surface that you manually edited.

If that is not a sufficient answer, you have a couple of options.

Before doing any of these I would create another surface and call it 'Smoothed Surface' and paste your original surface into to. Or make a copy of the file.

First, I would try to Simply Surface under the Edit Surface Tab in the Contextual Ribbon

You can compare it to the original surface if you leave the original surface to see if you accomplished what you were looking for.

If that doesn't work, you can turn the points and triangles on in your surface style:

Then you can manually edit each point using Modify Point or Raise/Lower

Another out option and this is a little out of the box. You could draw straight polylines and offset them 5 feet from each other so your entire surface is covered by these polylines. Trim the polylines using the border of your current surface (you can extract your border) so the polylines do not extend beyond your current surface. Next, Create Feature Lines from objects. Select all your polylines and drape them on the surface and select the 'add intermediate grade break points'

After you have all your feature lines you can Weed them, however, you can only weed one feature line at a time.


If weeding a feature line one at a time is too time-consuming you could explode the feature lines, then use the MAPCLEAN command to weed/simply all of the polylines at once. Then create feature lines from those polylines. Create a new surface from those feature lines, then compare to the original.

Hopefully one of these works for you!

[Anonymous]

Hello jmessal, thank you for your responses, I will try last of them,
because first options are not possible. This surface was not created by
points. It was made by countour curves/polylines, for this reason smoothing
surface tool does not work. And I neither can remove points by elevations
or modify them.

What I thought was draw some 3D splines from triangles, becomes them in 3D
polylines and then create a surface from these polylines.

I will let you know.
Regards.

[Anonymous]

I think adding intermediate grade break points would be more efficient.  But we're thinking the same way.

Good Luck and let us know what ends up working for you.

[AllenJessup]

Did you add the polylines as Contours or as Breaklines? You may get a better result by adding them as Breaklines.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I added as Countours, maybe as Breaklines. Maybe as Breaklines I can take
midpoint of triangles and create a new surface. I will let you know if it
works.

Thanks for response.
Regards.

[Anonymous]

Not sure why you want to do this, but thinking a little outside of the box, there is another option.

Can you turn your surface into a point cloud (or is it a point cloud already)?

If so you can process the point cloud file in 'ReCap' and create an 'rcp' file. You could then attach this to the drawing and create a surface from a point cloud. When creating a surface from a point cloud you have the option of non-ground point filtering. The 'kriging' method will assume an average between points with large varying elevations. Personally I don't use this when creating surfaces from point clouds, so I am unsure how it will interpret you surface data.

Regards,

Peter

[AllenJessup]

I understand why you might want to do this for "Looks". But I'm always leery of altering original data. Granted that contours aren't original data. But you're plan would move you further from the original. I'd suggest you try the Surface editing tools, especial Swap Edge.

I used to have to deal with someone who wanted the Surfaces to look "Smooth" I'd end up creating one to display on the plans and another to the volume calculations from.

[Anonymous]

I'm with you @AllenJessup the amount of effort doesn't match the gains. Cut/Fill Volume calcucations are not an exact science. You have shrink and swell factors that are likely not being considered without a geotech report. 

I think @Anonymous option is a viable approach, but again, your results are unscientific at best. Try adding them as breaklines instead of countours or just build yourself a more accurate surface by getting more point information from the field. 

Do you have access to LIDAR? I'm not sure if you're trying to clean-up an existing surface or a finished grade.

[Joe-Bouza]

3-4 meters change to 1 meter!

wow that some “edit”

i think you want to build a proposed surface to come to your section view. The simplify surface tools are for  performance related to the og surface . Your described and section tell me you want to grade to the section definition and compare.

taking out 3-4 meters of og sounds like cut to me