Trimble Realworks Profiles

Posts: 56
Joined: 05/25/10

Trimble Realworks Profiles

Posted by tlubic on Nov 19, 2010 12:07 pm

I have a mesh created in Realworks from my point cloud of an earth dam. I am trying to get the elevation deltas between the point cloud mesh and my conventional cross sections. Anyone out there using realworks and have any suggestions. I have tried using the twin surface inspection tool, which I can get the differences in the software but can not get them out to put into a table for the report. It makes a nice map, but I have to put my cursor over the points and it will display the deltas.

John Hamilton

Posts: 4720
Joined: 05/25/10

Re: Trimble Realworks Profiles

Posted by John Hamilton on Nov 19, 2010 6:05 pm

I found a way to do it in Global Mapper. I import the xyz point cloud as an elevation grid, which it then creates a dtm from. Then I import the points that I surveyed, select them with the digitizer tool (edit...select all features with digitizer tool), and right click to get a function "Apply Elevations from Terrain Layers to Selected Feature(s)". GM then replaces the elevation attribute for all of the points I selected with the DTM derived value. I then file...export vector format...csv and I have a file that has the points with the dtm values. I load them into excel along with the original file, and I can see the differences.

Seems like this should be easy to do in Trimble Real Works software, but it isn't. At least it is not readily apparent.

It would be nice if it kept the old elevation as an attribute.

Sed Lot

Posts: 25
Joined: 07/02/10

Re: Trimble Realworks Profiles

Posted by Sed Lot on Nov 19, 2010 6:16 pm

Well played, John.

When I briefly used Trimble Realworks this summer, I had the same experience as tlubic. It was easy to make an impressive picture, but it was hard to get at what seems like logical stuff that should be in the program.

Have they fixed the scaling issues with the cross sections? When I cut cross sections in Realworks, it forced a strange scale that seemed somehow related to metric units.

MLB

Posts: 208
Joined: 04/06/10

Re: Trimble Realworks Profiles

Posted by MLB on Nov 19, 2010 7:04 pm

John- that is the same impression I got with Realworks. The Demos at TD worked great. But in the "Real World" Realworks seems to lack a few features. This is not unusual when new technology is introduced. It often takes several releases before the majority of users are comfortable with it. This is typically the case with many "professional" software packages.
MLB