When you include a surface in a drawing, the surface is represented by the Surface Drawing Objects it creates. A surface might draw contour lines and label them with the elevation. The contour lines and their labels are Surface Drawing Objects.
Surface Drawing Objects are similar to the lines and labels created by traverses. They are part of TPC's Drawing View technology. You just tell TPC how you want to draw the surface and TPC draws it for you.
Surface Drawing Objects have some unique characteristics.
A surface can generate contour lines and lebel them with their elevatins. TPC has settings for both major and minor contour lines. You can set their contour interval, color, line type, line width, label font and size and select the layer to draw them on. See Contours dialog and Surface Layers.
Contour lines can be drawn as straight line segments (called engineering contours) or can be smoothed to better represent the more gradual way in which contours change direction. See Contour Smoothing.
You can also represent the TIN that models the surface by drawing TIN lines and labels. These are actually the edges of the trianges created by the TIN. Each edge is drawn just one time and can be represented with whatever color, line type, font and font size you want, just like contour lines. TIN lines can not be smoothed since they must represent the straight lines between triangle verticies. See TIN dialog.
Breaklines are a just special TIN lines. They can have their own color, line type and line width. By drawing both the TIN lines and the Breaklines, you can graphically see where you have inserted breaklines into the surface. Turn on TIN lines and Breaklines settings before you edit breaklines in your surface and TPC will draw the breaklines as you insert or remove them. Its pretty neat to wath this work. See Breaklines.
In a TIN, volumes are computed as the difference between each triangle in the surface to something else (another surface, an elevation, etc). We sometimes think of this in terms of a cut or fill. TPC can shade in the TIN's triangles to show were a cut was involved, where a fill was involved and where the difference as zero. TPC calls this volume shading.
You will probably find it most helpful when computing the volume between two surfaces. Volume shading generates an easy to understand, visual model of what the differences were. You might include this is your volume reports or use volume shading for planning exhibits.
As part of TPC's Slope Analysis, you can shade in the different slope ranges. You can also add the slope colors to the legend automatically, making a very nice presentation.
Each surface has default Surface Settings it uses to represent itself in a drawing. However, within a drawing, a surface can also have unique surface settings that are used only by that drawing. See Unique Surface Settings.
Each Surface Drawing Object is placed on a layer determined by the surface. You can modify the layers the surface uses in order to separate or combine these objects. See Surface Layers.
Surfaces
TIN and Breakline Settings
Slope Analysis
Surface Volume
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