Edit a TIN surface

00:06

In this video, we're going to talk about TIN lines, we've talked about them before,

00:10

but we're actually going to show what they look like and we're going to talk about how to edit those TIN lines.

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So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to drop into our Surface,

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we're going to go to EG and we're going to right click and do Surface Properties.

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I often find that it's easier to edit a surface using a edit-specific surface style.

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So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to dropdown and I'm going to create a new surface style.

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What I'm going to do is I'm going to call this surface style Edit.

00:35

And then I'm going to jump over into Display and I'm going to turn on my triangles, my points, and that's the only thing I'm going to do.

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Triangles and points, they tend to make the drawings messy,

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so most of the time you don't want to muddy any of your other surface styles by turning on the triangles and the points.

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Or you don't want to have to go through going and turning them on and then turning them off to do the edits.

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So I find it easier to just create an edit surface style, and then use that when I want to make my surface edits.

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So I'm going to go ahead and hit "Apply" and hit "OK".

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And what you can see in here now is you can see these cyan lines that are my TIN lines.

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And then at every vertex, endpoint of a triangle, what you see is this red point here and that is a point that is creating my surface.

01:24

So when I'm doing a surface edit, what I'll often look for is areas that have large spans for a triangle.

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So something like this area down here.

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You can see we're spanning from one side over here all the way to the other side over here.

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I tend to like to see smaller triangles when I'm creating surfaces.

01:44

If it's a large flat area, that's one thing,

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but when we're dealing with a surface like this that has some pretty good canyons coming down and some more ridges up through here,

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when you get to the bottom and the outside edges and you see large spans like these here and large spans like these here,

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those are usually data pieces that are not quite representing what's actually happening in the real world.

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So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to click on the surface and then the contextual ribbon bar comes up.

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Inside of the contextual ribbon bar, you have your edit surface options.

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Those edit surface options are also available in the Definitions dropdown under Edits, if you right click and select add, delete, or swap edge.

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So you can do either location.

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I tend to select the surface and then dropdown and then select my option from here.

02:33

So if you had a hole and you wanted to add a line, you could add a line, but we don't have any holes that we need to add lines to.

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So I'm going to first show what swap edge does and then I'm going to delete some of the lines that I don't want anymore.

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So what swap edge does is, it says, I have a line here that's going from this point here to this point here,

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and it may not necessarily be the correct line that I have and I want to maybe draw it in a different way.

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And so it finds the next available point to create that edge from.

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So if I click it, now it's drawing a line from here to here, which may be better.

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It's a shorter triangle edge, it may more accurately reflect what's happening on the surface.

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And so you can change those or you can swap the edges and then see what that does to how your surface looks,

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and decide if that is acceptable and you keep it, or you can do as I'm going to do and I'm going to hit "Esc" and I'm going to delete these lines.

03:34

So I select delete line, and then you can either select each line individually,

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or you can do a window crossing across them and then hit "Enter" and remove those lines from the drawing.

03:45

So I'm going to remove those lines from my drawing and I am going to remove these lines from my drawing.