TIN Surface review
Hi,
at my company we use AutoCAD Civil 3D just because it have TIN surface. Today I found that BricsCAD Platinum have TIN Surface too. So I upgraded my Pro version to Platinum and checked how TIN Surface of BricsCAD works.
It looks much better than 3party alternatives I had check before. I did not had much time to check it fully, so will write only things I could not find that I use in AutoCAD TIN Surface.
1) Name. It is problematic because TIN Surface don't have a name. If you did not put TIN Surface to layer with right name it is hard to know what surface it is. Especially in case of TIN Volume Surface. In properties of TIN Volume Surface here are data. Base surface: 9F and Comparison surface: 93. It is hard to find right surfaces like this.
2) Half of our TIN Surfaces use Elevation coloring. It looks like BricsCAD don't have it yet.
3) Contour labels. We use them in some drawings, but could not find in BricsCAD.
4) TIN Volume Surface. In my option it is not needed surface. It should be better for all TIN surfaces to have Cut and Fill volume statistics, because TIN Volume Surface is not 3D entity, but 2.5D entity like TIN Surface. Example: I have survey data which shows thickness of something and not elevation, I create TIN Surface from it and I want to know its volume. Because TIN Surface don't have volume statistic I have to create new TIN Surface with all points equal to 0 and create TIN Volume Surface from this two TIN Surface, but I get exactly the same surface as my first TIN Surface. So it would be much better and faster if TIN Surface had volume statistics. I use TIN Volume Surface often, but not just for volume statistics, but for TIN Surface. I may have topography of land and thickness off some strata and I need to find bottom elevations of strata. So, create new TIN Surface from two TIN Surfaces are best options, but this third (TIN Volume Surface) don't really have volume, because it is not thickness, but elevation of strata. By all this I mean that volume comes not from two TIN Surfaces, but from data TIN Surface are made from: is it elevation or thickness data.
5) We often create TIN Surfaces from blocks. So adding create TIN Surface from block or block attribute would be good.
6) Adding TIN Surface elevation to block attribute are also needed.
We use grading and combining (pasting) several TIN Surfaces in AutoCAD often, but I had not checked it in BricsCAD yet. Will check it later.
Comments
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Got error message (attached image) so tried to post after 30 seconds like in error message and now we have two post.
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While you can do some TIN stuff in bcad, they have not yet tried to do what I would call a "full service" set of tools for civils.
I would recommend Carlson or Civil Site Design (correct name?) for real work, those are 3rd party.
Also, I am not a fan of the tin stuff being in platinum. I don't think they will ever get momentum with that approach.
They could make a different "level". They should put tin stuff in pro level for now as people are just playing with it.0 -
We search for new CAD because of price. BricsCAD + Carlson or CSD will have same price as AutoCAD Civil 3D. Only permanent license may make a difference. We don't use Civil functionality like roads and so on. Carlson Geology and Land mining would be best option for us or just Land mining. Geology module may be overkill for us.
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