Categorize Areas of TIN Surfaces (Hatching, Analysis, Rendering, and AI Area Recognition)

[CodeDing]

I'm in the Survey community and we work to create accurate and well-formed existing surfaces. So we create a lot of TIN surfaces. These existing surfaces go to a lot of engineers and designers so they can usually analyze existing land and even propose new designs. However well we create these models, there's usually one primary thing that these engineers and designers use... the TIN surface.

We could create much better deliverables for almost all of our products if we had the ability to classify areas (triangles & triangle groups) of these TIN surfaces.  Similar to how point clouds get classified, the areas of these surfaces could be categorized/classified also.

The ability to categorize a surface would benefit a few areas that I can see:

1) It would make hatching 1,000,000,000% easier. Currently, users that want to hatch an area on a TIN surface have to either select an area that is outlined by breaklines (1% chance of this happening) or they have to MANUALLY outline the area, then hatch the outline (99% of the time). This is sooo time consuming! If categories were applied to a TIN surface, they could just turn on/display a certain category with a given hatch. Boom, done hatching.

2) It could improve an Engineers analysis of an existing surface. If an engineer is calculating runoff or water retention of a surface, then categorized areas of a surface can hold runoff coefficients to better help the engineer analyze the entire surface in one analysis, rather than calculating different areas manually with different coefficients.

3) It would improve renderings by allowing more than ONE material. Currently, there's only 1 material you can apply to a TIN surface... You know, the surface that you just created to showcase an entire roadway, 3 buildings, a gravel drive and 5 lawns. That doesn't make much sense. With categorization, we can now apply & render different materials to different areas of the surface.

3) It could showcase AI within Autodesk products. Since AI is the new hot buzzword, and even sometimes a practical sidekick, then it can be used to help analyze and identify these categorized areas of a surface. It can use CoGo point descriptions, styles, point groups, and layers. It can use breaklines within the surface, analyze their group name, their layer(s), and compare the CoGo points around it to determine an area/category. It might take some elbow-grease but this can be done more practically and efficiently than classifying a point cloud. 

Obviously classification should / could be applied by the user AFTER all TIN surface work has been completed. This would pose the best case for effective results. But honestly, it could be done at surface conception / edits.

For some simple visuals, here's some CoGo point layouts from an example survey (with Survey Figures / Feature Lines):

Currently, we have to create manual outlines of these areas...

...then hatch them...

But, a tool could be created to analyze the triangles of the surface, the cogo points that contributed, the breaklines, the layering, the point groups...

...to create categorized areas, which can be hatched...

...and also materials that can be applied to the categorized areas:

Hope this is taken into consideration!

Best,

~DD

[cwr001]

I'm not sure about the AI part but that would be awesome!

I'd add that there should also be the ability to specify the appearance for different classifications for profiles and sections.

[Kevin.Spear]

I would hope that surface conditions for a given area would be on the horizon given the amount of GIS integration/hydrology tool investment Autodesk is working on. In fact, it may be a GIS based tool that creates these "coverages" and applied to a surface and saves this info in a property set some how.  Fingers crossed!

[TimYarris]

Thank you for your idea -- this is a great one. The development team will review the idea while customers continue to add feedback and vote on it.