Refining a Terrain

You can enrich a terrain mesh by inserting survey points—also called control points from a cloud of points.

When necessary, the Refine Terrain command allows you to deform the input terrain mesh so that survey points become vertices of the terrain mesh. Survey points must be converted to a cloud of points either importing an ASCII file or using the Clouds /Points command available in the Create section of the action bar. For more information see About Format Files and Creating Clouds/Points.

Before you begin: A terrain mesh must be open.
See Also
About Terrain Preparation
Tools Section
  1. From the View section of the action bar, click , and select triangles.
  2. From the Prepare section of the action bar, click Refine Terrain .
    The Refine Terrain dialog box appears. In this dialog box, a Survey check box is available to flag points as survey points, and two other check boxes, Threshold and Direction, allow you to complete the refine operation.
  3. Select the Threshold check box and specify a threshold value.

    By default, The value is set to 10mm.

    All points that are greater than 10mm are ignored in the refine calculation.

  4. Select the Direction check box.

    By default, the direction in the projection along the normal of the triangle.

  5. Select a terrain mesh.
    A dedicated terrain label appears. It displays the terrain's name and provides option buttons for modifying the terrain:
    • : To clear the selection.
    • : To hide or show the terrain.
    Note: If you select a terrain that contains survey points, the survey points are displayed with their symbol and color.
  6. Select clouds.
    Important: You can select multiple clouds at once.

    A dedicated cloud label appears. It displays the cloud's name and provides option buttons for modifying the cloud:

    • : To remove the cloud from selection.
    • : To hide or how the cloud.

  7. Optional: Expand the label to modify the color and the symbol used to identify points.
  8. Click Apply to launch the computation.
  9. Click OK.



If the computation is successful, you can run a deviation analysis to compare the terrain mesh (To Measure) and the resulting surface (Reference).