3D lines to Surfaces?

Hello All,

First post here.

I am a project engineer at an underground mine. I regularely work with CMS (cavity Monitor Survey) data that is typically provided to me as a collection of triangular 3D faces that represent the interior surface of an open cavity within rock.

These files typically have 30,000 to 80,000 faces.

The last time I requested a survey the consultant indicated that their scanner was out of the country for repairs, but that they could generate a similar model by a different method.

What they did is shot many survey points then manually drew lines between them to give the outward appearance of the the normal deliverable. To the surveyors credit, he drew 3,800 lines to generate this wireframe.

My problem is that I normally have to slice the scans to provide planar outlines to our design engineers... and I can't slice lines.

Does anyone know of a way to generate these surfaces automatically? Is there a lisp out there for this? Essentially I would like to shrinkwrap it.

Working in AutoCAD 2000, but also have MicroStation V8 and MineCAD. MineCAD has a Tessellation function that is partially successful, but tends to join points together incorrectly and "fills" my cavity with random surfaces.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

sample.dwg

I had been feeling down on myself for not being able to come up with a solution to my little problem.

After a day with no comments or suggestions I am not feeling so bad (unless people just feel this problem is beneath them and I really ought to know how to do this!).

One of my colleagues informed me that his brother had found a solution. I was a excited to hear it... but his solution was to manually draw the 3D-Faces. Not quite what I was looking for!

Oh well, maybe I'll try again another day.

Thanks for looking.

Have you posted the question anywhere else? Perhaps at the AutoDesk Civil 3D discussion forum?

To be honest with you I have very little exposure to other/newer AutoDesk offerings. I don't know what capabilities the other applications have.

For whatever reason we remain in the dark ages for both hardware and software.

Are there any other products that may be able to help?

This individual situation is not terribly critical. I can instruct my surveying contractor to provide me with a better deliverable. This is not the first time I have run into this problem... that's why I am trying so hard to find a solution.

Thanks,

Dave

Maybe two answers there has been previous posts here re a TIN program to make 3d faces of points, the second is if your lines are 3d lines then you can draw a line over the top and use the VL intersectwith or lisp inters option to calculate 3d points and draw a cross section etc. I did the second method for house designs but no longer have the code.

See if CAD TOOLS (it is free) has all you need.

That "CAD TOOLS" package has a lot of great stuff in it!

Oddly enough, many of the items are included in my company's extensive mining command package (three menus of tools they developed over the years)... but I will definetly be installing CAD Tools at home.

Oddly enough, the "Surface" tool behaves the exact same way that Tesselation does in MineCAD. If fills seems to join points randomly.

I'll keep working on this problem when I have free time.

Thanks!

Ask for the point cloud and generate a model from the point cloud, you have many options to do that.