Topic Title

Hello Guys,

Here is a study for trying to search over capabilities of our two surface dropping engines: using direct Drop Mesh function, and using the TIN Modeler.

I started from a shadow of points which were supplied by land surveying. In fact, have exagerated the values of the terrain levels, to increase the possibility to understand inconsistencies among both methods.

You can see some differences among the methods. At left usind Drop Mesh (DM) it creates a virtual rectangle using the extremed positioned points on the database. Must be remarked that you can cut-off any excess of surface by using 3D-Knife. On introduction, sounded to me better shaped the DM solution instead of the TIN way to show the terrain surface.



Here is an o2c rendered image of the terrain using the Drop Mesh surface.



... and here is the TIN surface. It appears to be smoother then the other model. You should notice that it apparently have effect from the Edge Smoothing Angle, defined on o2c Rendering Settings.



Here are both surfaces, being shown physically coincident. You can notice that there are many points unmatching on the surface dropped over the same source survey points.



And from now I've dropped the Contour Curves over the original points. And using as the source the curves, have dropped surfaces using both methods: Drop Mesh at left, and TIN Modeler at right.



Here is the o2c rendered image from the same terrain modeled from a Mesh surface dropped over the contour curves:



The surface generated from a TIN modelling appears in better detailing as the other process:



Comparing both methods with surfaces being dropped over Curves:



Here is another matching among the same method: Drop Mesh. The Blue is over Points, and the Lt Grey is over Curves.



And this one is for both surfaces generated by the same method TIN Surface. The lighter Green is over Points and the darker is over Curves.



Here are coincident the two surfaces in vectorial displaying, both generated from TIN Modeler:



The TIN over Points is limited bt the restrict "number of points", what gives a harder tesselated surface:



And the TIN over Curves gain a lot of smoothness on modeling the surface.



Well, IMHO, the Drop Mesh method is faster to achieve quick results, and is easier also for modeling since is extends the surface over the orthogonal projection of the extremelly located points, what allows to easily cut-off the excess and present a quick effect for the terrain modeling.
But, TIN Modeller seems to be more accurate to represent the terrain surface, and should be improved on the surface extension to make easier the edition.

I intend to expand a bit this search, BTW...

Thanks,
Miguel