Anyone Here Using Terramodel

Anyone Here Using Terramodel also,

.. . . or do you have your hands full enough just keeping up with
Autocad?


Happy Trails To You

 

On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 04:02:02 -0500,

Hi,

Did you ever find any sources of information for Terramodel - books,
web sites, discussion groups like this - anything at all outside of
Trimble? I've seen the few commercial web sites that sell tml code
and offer pricey consulting, but no self-help stuff like what abounds
for acad and many other things.

I am by no means an acad expert, or even much of a user, and I have
only had about 3 months exposure and a couple more of hard use of
Terramodel, but I'm starting to find it very easy to fix up mistakes
in acad drawings. It seems the acad pilots don't understand the
concept of points and elevations very well.

I've got the processing time of small to medium shopping centre jobs
supplied to me in acad, for which I must do volume calcs and later
prepare terrain models for automatic grading , down to well under a
day in normal cases where there aren't too many elevations missing or
screwed up.

Some of that subggrade transition stuff on the roads leaves me a
little puzzled, however. Are you any good at that? Like , how do you
maintain a minimum of 3% grade and a minimum of 400 mm thickness of
rock base on a roadbed when transitioning through 0% on the finished
surface on a curve-left-curve-right

I've been told by a long term user of Terramodel for building roads
that it's way ahead of acad for quick and simple 3D visualizations of
surfaces, which makes it really easy to sort out bugs in elevations
and etc.

Did you want to find something better than Tm for some reason or
specific application, or are you just looking to diversify your
skills?


Happy Trails To You

 

MMccall,

This group is specifically for acad. Maybe what we should do is move
our conversation over to comp.infosystems.gis. While much of the
discussion there is about arcinfo, I don't think they have any
specific sw in mind in that group.

It's almost as if that tmlstore guy decided he could make more money
selling tml's & tm expertise and stopped giving it away free. Maybe
it's the surveyor's mindset in action - don't tell anyone how you do
anything - it may shorten your own useful working life.

That's probably why they haven't released quite enough material for
someone to write a good book about how to use Tm.

In the Trimble courses, the instructors are reluctant to even answer
questions that are a bit off topic, even if they are not covered in
another course.

Terramodel's still miles ahead of anything else - acad can't even calc
angles on a road alignment accurately, and the database designed for
tm 20 years ago is still better than anything else. A new one based
on 3D point positions would be much nicer, of course - maybe someone's
working on it now.

When the makers of Tm sold it off - to plus4 or iplus or whoever it
was had it before Trimble, they had a list of specific things to add,
for example roads cut/fill volume balancing. These things were never
done, and it silly to think that Trimble would ever put stuff like
that into Tm as long as they have dopey old Paydirt that can do this.

I think Tm's got about 5 useful years left in it, then it will
probably be overtaken by something new. There are so many things that
acad and the others just do not do, or don't do very well, that there
is still in 2005 room for a new civil package that works like Tm.

There is a LOT of new interest in Tm being generated by Trimble's (and
others) new sales into the 3D machine control market - Graders &
Bulldozers. A lot of contractors that previously had to do no design
of their own, and just worked from paper plans produced by acad,
microstation, whatever, are now looking for something easier than acad
to learn to adapt designs to produced a 3D TIN to run a machine to.

This is why I'm learning it.

Trimble is bundling a low-priced Tm starter kit in with the grading
systems, and has recently released ver10.4 - a greatly beefed-up
low-end version with a lot of commands that were previously locked to
more expensive modules. It is specifically for this market.

So maybe it's a good time to start on a "Contractor's Guide To
Terramodel" for converting 2d acad drawings to something useable for
producing a TIN and some linework that makes sense to a survey layout
package - like one with real POINTS with real ELEVATIONS, something
that is usually missing from the acad design.

Also, the US military has recently adopted Tm as a standard for these
applications, so we might see some renewed interest both on the part
of users and also on the part of Trimble in making it a more popular
tool.

- Happy Trails

================

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 22:35:11 -0500,

Happy Trails To You