Creating Topographical Curves with BuildIT Construction

Tutorial Download

If you would like to download the file used in this article, download the accompanying Training Data and extract its contents to a folder on your PC.

Create a Reference Plane

Open the “Garage_scan.buildit” file by selecting “File > Open” and navigating to where the file is saved.

1. Select “Refine > Extract Surface”.
2. Create a plane from cloud.
   1. Select the “Fill” option for selecting points.
   2. Select points with the cursor.
   3. Ensure “Create new cloud from identified points” is checked.
   4. Select “Apply”.
      
      

Create Topographical Curves

Now, the analysis will be performed.

• Select “Evaluate > Floor/Grade Analysis > Create Topographical Curves”.
• Select the Cloud.
  • Ensure that you select the main point cloud "FARO_LS0792_118".
• Select the “Reference Plane”.
• Specify a zone size. Use 6 inches for this exercise.
  • The zone size is the sampling distance on a grid for the analysis.
• Select Cell average for "Height Evaluation".
  • Cell average will create an average reference point from all the points in a cell.
  • Low/High Point will create a point from the highest or lowest deviation from reference to represent the cell.
  • Center Point will create a point from the point closest to the middle of the cell.
• Enter 0.5 inch for “Iso-height curve spacing”.
  • This value represents the detail level of the topography. The lower the number, the finer the difference in topographic height deviation.
• Min. island size
  • Minimum island size controls the minimum size of contours. If you run the command and have a high number of small contours, increase the value of minimum island size.
• Check “Detect walls”.
  • This setting detects walls in the scan data and ignores them instead of creating curves to represent this cell.
• Check “Clean up debris”.
• Enter 12 inches for “Clean-up height”.
  • This controls the maximum point height per cell. This is useful to include then there is extra data in the scan other than the floor.
• Select “Apply”.

Result:

Note: You can uncheck "Display Object" for the two point clouds and Plane2 to achieve a better onscreen view of the result.

NOTE: The resulting *.dxf file will be automatically saved in the same folder as your saved BuildIT file. Also, there will be text labels of each contour.