Options when combining Surfaces

[Anonymous]

Currently when combining surfaces, the only option we have is pasting one on top of the other.

I would like the ability to be able to combine surfaces in other ways, such as keeping the highest portion of each surface, or the lowest.

The ability to trim one surface to another would also be very useful. Currently we have to compare them with a volume TIN, identify the zero contours, extract them as featurelines or polylines, and then use them as boundaries. This though is time consuming and is not dynamic.

[fcernst]

I voted for your first paragraph, however we already have the capability to use a surface as a boundary.

[Anonymous]

@fcernstI am curios as to what you mean by using a surface as a boundary.

My 2nd comment was about being able to trim one surface to another where they intersect. If you know of a dynamic way to do this, that will update if one of the surfaces is edited, I would be very interested to know as I've never found a way to do this.

Regards,

Peter

[autoMick]

There was an idea that popped up a few years back related to the top paragraph which I voted for enthusiastically. If I remember correctly, the idea was to allow mathematical operators between surfaces. So you could take the min, max, average, if/then, etc. formulae to compare 2 surfaces and generate a 3rd.

Cheers

Mick

[Anonymous]

@autoMickI never saw the previous idea. It's a shame we're still here asking if it was a few years ago.

TBH I would have thought they could achieve it using the same process as volume surfaces but with a tweak. For example if I wanted to keep the highest elevation only of two surfaces, instead of just triangulating the difference between each surface, that difference at each triangulation point, where positive would be added to the base surface elevation at that point. Where the difference is negative, just ignore and use the base surface point. Voila, new surface with only the highest elevation of both. Opposite could be done for lowest elevations. The difference could be halved (whether negative or positive) and added to the base surface elevation to create an average surface etc. etc.

It would just require a tweak in the code where it calculates the difference between the two surfaces at a particular point. At that point in the code the base elevation, comparison elevation and difference would be known, so just need to add a new calc before storing the value.

Though I'm sure I make it sound much more simple than it actually is...…..