Topical Topics: Topography and Terrain – Make it a piece of cake

You’ve just received your detail survey with all the finicky RL points and contour lines of your site and now you have to punch all that data into your project. They sent you a DWG (and a PDF) and the file always lands somewhere weird and at an angle. It looks like a mess in your project file; the RL numbers are at odd angles, hard to read and you can’t figure out which point it is related to what.

Manually entering points into your project is tedious and can take hours of your precious time. One decimal point in the wrong direction sending your project off a dramatic virtual and metaphorical cliff. If you’re lucky you can extract a terrain from the 3D contour lines in your DWG - but even that comes with mixed results, becomes abstract, and leaves you liable for any misinterpreted data.

Why risk all the effort when the solution was all yours to begin with? Your site’s terrain is already modelled in 3D in the survey by a surveyor! You just need the means to extract it. Your surveyor can supply you with a XYZ file in .csv or .txt which easily imports and generates a survey accurate surface in less than 10 clicks.

Or let a survey modeler do the work for you and receive a 3D ready-made, verified surface in IFC, 3D DWG or Revit file. I hear CMS Surveyors does a great job ??

Cheers,

Ren - That BIM Modeler who works with Surveyors