Howdy folks,
today I would like to talk about a nice little feature which enables you to flatten out terrain patches. Recently a couple of users humbled across this section and therefore I’d like to post it today.
So why would you flatten a coverage?
You can draw a coverage representing a green space or a beach. These patches will eventually be part of the terrain and texturing it. This means that the green spaces or beaches or whatever you draw will follow the terrain.
But there are other use cases where you need to have a coverage which is flat. Think of parking areas or football fields. You might also use a coverage not only for texturing the terrain rather than flatten the terrain. Think of water areas (in case the terrain underneath is grumpy) or leveling a proposed site before you place a building or some structure on it for planning purposes.
In order to achieve to flatten a coverage you have two choices:
1. Draw or import a coverage in AIM. Zoom into it and select one of the vertexes. Use the little
blue cylinder and move one vertex up/down just a little. This will flatten the coverage at an average height of all vertexes.
2. I must be said that this workflow is a bit tricky and therefore I want to provide a better workflow based on a little script.
- Unzip the Download FlattenSelectionSet.js
- Open the model in AIM
- Select the feature(s) you want to flatten
- Show the JS window (ribbon -> Manage -> Create and run Scripts)
- Press “load” in the scripting window (top left) and select the unzip JS script
- Press “Start script” in the scripting window (center left)
- NOTE: the coverage will be flattened to the height of the lowest vertex and is set in the 4th row
of the script: geom.To3d(bbox.Min.Z). In order to specify s custom height like 145 m for example oyu need to change it to geom.To3d(145.0).
Hope it helps and feedback is welcome.