SC. Surface Lab tab
- iarmstrong
Overview
Surface Lab tab in Spatial Conformetrics is used to add operations for interacting with project surfaces (clipping by polygons, getting upper and lower surfaces and appending to one another).
Adding Operations
Surface Lab consists of four main sections, described in more details below.
Operations Set Panel
In this panel you can create a new operation set with a descriptive name indicating what this set is expected to create.
An operation set can be copied with the files swapped out for a different outcome.
Icons | Symbol | Description |
|---|---|---|
Blue Plus |  | Create a new blank Operation Set. All operations must be individually added. |
Double Page | Copy an existing Operation Set including all existing operations. If the same operations are being used to create a phase, swap out the required files. | |
Red X | Remove highlighted Operation Set. | |
Up / Down arrows | Reorder Operation Set by moving highlighted set up/down the list. |
All icons have tools tips.
Operations Panel
A series of Boolean operations is added in the Operations panel to create a final outcome. Organising the creation of the final files in sets displays a high degree of transparency in what files were used to create the final solid allowing ease of error trapping.
Click the Add Operation button to display a list of the available operations. Each operation performs a single boolean step and a number of these steps are used in concert to create the final result.
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Operations from Add Operation dropdown are described in table below.
Operation | Description |
|---|---|
Upper Surface | An open surface is created of the upper part of the input solid(s). |
Lower Surface | An open surface is created of the lower part of the input solid(s). |
Clip Surface by Polygon (Exclude Outside) | Intersect a surface with a polygon(s). This can be digitised in graphics or imported. Excludes the outside. |
Clip Surface by Polygon (Exclude Inside) | Outersect a surface with a polygon(s). This can be digitised in graphics or imported. Excludes the inside. |
Append Surfaces | Append surfaces to one another in the given order. |
Navigation and Control
Besides Add Operations button Operations panel also contains icons to delete operations, move up/down, run and save results to the file or Layers panel.
See the detailed description of these icons in the table below.
Icons | Symbol | Description |
|---|---|---|
Red X | Remove highlighted Operation/ | |
Up / Down arrows | Reorder operations by moving highlighted set up/down the list. | |
Blue triangle (Play sign) | Run selected operation. | |
Save Disc | Save the result of the selected operation to a file. | |
Green Arrow | Save the result of the selected operation to the Layers panel. |
Viewport and Layers panel
In a Viewport you may review and work with results of operations and imported layers.
Depending on the operations that are being run, different icons become available at a top of viewport.
In Layers panel you may import surfaces and solids triangulations, display and organise them, as well as assign colors, visibility etc.
Detailed description of the Viewport tools and Layers panel options see in the Common UI Elements section.
Exercises
Do the following exercises to get a better understanding of Operations Sets.
Clipping Surfaces
Use the Clip Surface by Polygon operation to reduce the size of a surface file.
Import surface file (can be imported from a file or from the Layers panel).
Drag & drop files from the Layers to the Operations panel > Surface field, click on the icon and drag.
Using the polygon tool draw a polygon around the area to keep.
4. Run the operation by pressing the blue triangle sign.
5. Click on Result row to see the outcome in the viewport.
6. Click on the green arrow icon to save the result to the Layers panel. The layer generated will be called after the Operation Set name and the Operation number.
Benefits of clipping surfaces:
Loading smaller files into memory excluding data not required.
Reduces time when running setup tasks.
Reduces size of the project files.
Excludes unnecessary extends of larger surfaces.
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