Surfacing for Cyclone jockeys…
I am working on a better, faster and more automated process for creating surfaces in Cyclone using point cloud data. This is my workflow I have developed so far, it is working pretty well. If the ground is densely covered then Cyclone does a pretty good job of finding the ground even when a lot of trees are present. It gets more tricky where the ground data is more sparse, it helps to clean some…
I developed a new semi-automated surface modeling workflow in Cyclone??
- Start with a new unified modelspace.
- Clean around the edges.
- Clean trees and other vertical items out in areas with sparse ground shots down to ground. This is not necessary in the middle of the work area where the ground is densely covered with point cloud. Also the cleaning does not need to be extremely clean, a quick cleaning close to ground is sufficient.
- Pick a single point somewhere in the middle which is on the ground surface.
- Activate the command ??Set Plane Origin at Pick Point.? This sets the active reference plane to that point.
- Draw a polygonal fence around a small area.
- Create a layer (shift-L) for your points and make it active.
- Tools–>Points on Grid
- Enter a point number to start. Cyclone crashes when I try to run it with a feature code entered but it??s not necessary anyway.
- Press Place Points. If your area is too big it??ll say too many points. In that case make your fence smaller. It seem to like a top down view with ortho mode selected (as opposed to perspective mode).
- Go have some coffee (don??t recommend whiskey because you??ll drain the bottle before the entire workflow is done).
- Lather-rinse-repeat until you whole site is covered. It does a pretty good job of finding the ground in areas where the ground is densely covered even though there are trees and other stuff in the way.
- My project generated almost 43000 points.
- This generates vertexes. Cyclone bogs way down because of all those vertexes.
- Go to Layers (shift-L) and highlight your layer and press Select.
- Wait a while, have some coffee. Eventually the vertexes all highlight.
- Edit–>Copy
- File–>Export
- Export selected to an .XYZ text file. You don??t need point numbers or codes, just XYZ.
- In the Cyclone Explorer highlight your Project folder (under the blue database cylinder), right-click and import your XYZ file.
- Now you have a Scanworld with a point cloud which is your surface points. Cyclone handles this a lot more efficiently than vertex points.
- This Scanworld may need some cleaning because the points on grid command isn??t perfect. I did a quick rough cleaning to get rid of the really obvious clouds in the air and below ground.
- I prefer to select and copy my cleaned cloud to a new modelspace at this point.
- Create a surface mesh. This will highlight your pyramids and holes in the ground. Countours can be helpful for this.
- Now I am doing a second more careful cleaning to get rid of points above or below the prevailing surface of the ground. This goes really fast because the point cloud is small. It will unify in about 5 seconds.
This process takes about a day instead of a week (or more when I blunder and forget to turn on all the point clouds) for a large point cloud area.
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