Flatten Surfaces

Use the Flatten Surface command to remove outlier vertices from a surface, resulting in a flatter surface.

Original surface:

Flattened surface:

Prerequisites:

• See the Subscription Plans page. For a license matrix by command, see the License page in the TBC Community. Also see View and manage licensed features.
• Surface with anomalous spikes

To flatten surfaces:

1. Select Flatten Surface in Surfaces > Edit to display the Flatten Surface command pane.
2. In the Surface drop-down list, select the surface you want to flatten.
3. In the Tolerance field, enter distance beyond which vertices will be considered outliers (and removed) when compared to neighboring surface vertices.
4. Select a Remove direction option to specify whether to remove outlier vertices extending upward (above) or downward (below) from surrounding vertices..

   If necessary, you can limit the removal of outlier vertices to a specific portion of the surface. In the following examples, you can see where boundaries (yellow polygons) were used to specify the areas to be flattened.

   Before flattening with boundaries selected:

   

   After flattening with boundaries selected:

   

5. Optionally, to use a boundary to specify a portion of the surface to be flattened:
   1. Create a boundary or polygon specifying the area of the surface to be flattened.
   2. Check the Use boundary check box
   3. Select the boundary object.

   You have the option of keeping the changes applied to the selected surface or keeping the selected surface unchanged and applying the changes to a new surface

6. Optionally, to create a new surface with the changes and leave the selected surface unchanged, check the Create new surface check box.
7. If the selected surface includes breaklines you want to include in the flattened surface, check the Consider breaklines check box.

   Note: The toolbar in the Create Surface Intersection Lines command pane includes handy shortcuts to several surface-related commands.

8. Click Apply.

   Note: Since the command is looking for outliers, large areas of spikes (for example, part of a tree that was included in the surface) might be too large to flatten completely the first time you run the command. Running the command iteratively will eventually remove all of the outliers from the surface.

Related topics

Surfaces