Combining multiple surfaces into One

In some situations a user would like the road surfaces (eg. roadsurface, shoulder, ditches) to be joined to one big surface because of requirements in export to 3rd Party solutions, typically exports to LandXML for machining equipment.
The road task doesn't contain a complete surface like this, so the user needs to do a triangulation to combine the surfaces to one bigger surface.

This can also be applied for multiple road tasks surfaces that are side-by-side.

The same process can be used for combining each of the road/rail pavement layers, one by one.

The Process

1. Start a Ground Surface task

2. Pick the road task as input

3. Specify to only include the road surface features (here you can use the global attribute filter: “Medium = On terrain”

   • For a specific pavement layer you need to pick the correct features for that data

4. Go to settings in Ground Surface task

   • Go to TIN priority > Turn OFF “Keep TIN structure”

   • Go to TIN breaklines > Turn ON “Use TIN edges from surface geometry as breakline”

   • Close the settings dialog

5. In the "Outer boundaries" for the task, take the same objects used as input for the Ground Surface task

   • Note: this ensures that the new surface does not become bigger than the original surfaces.

6. Specify a different target feature if it is relevant

7. Complete the task

Note 1:  Some triangulations can take extended time to complete.

Note 2:  The process is similar to fixing corrupt TIN-surfaces imported to Quadri.

Known Questions

Question: The surface that I have produced is still not one surface, what do I do?

• Answer 1: Make sure that the surfaces you want to combine into ONE are actually close enough so that they can actually be ONE. If they are not close to eachother but still need to be combined to one, this is not possible.

• Answer 2: When the data does not really represent one continous surface it is hard to join them.

  • • In these cases for roadsurfaces, never have the roadmodel disappear totally (i.e. not having boundaries going to the centerline on both sides at the same time

    • In the cases for multiple roadmodels, make sure the data you have as input are overlapping at some point.

    • In the case for pavement layers where they come and go along the road it can be a tip to never set the layer to 0.000m thickness, but rather 1mm thickness or greater. Then the surface exists, and it is possible to join the different pieces.

Question: When exporting this surface to LandXML I don't get any breaklines

• Answer 1: Make sure the relevant stakeout stringlines in the model are included in the export.

• Answer 2: Make sure the surface and stakeout stringlines are sent to the same surface in the LandXML file.