This is a followup to the Materials release. The goal is to solidify our UAV workflow and improve cleanup of point clouds.

• Additional Surfaces & Layers ( Gradework only?)
  • Although we know we can add more surfaces, some guidance on reasonableness from Dave should be requested. With 64 bit computers and larger amounts of Ram the current limits are conservative and drone data highlights the need.
  • Also examine Highway limitations on how it can use surfaces.

• Image View Control (Gradework and Sitework) - Similar to Alt-B but non-modal
  • Lists all images available with full names - toggle visibility - deletion
  • Versioning on images and separation to an images layer that like benchmarks is not bound to a surface

• Paint Brush cleanup (Gradework) - the ability to use the paintbrush feature to remove points by painting over them. We may want to dual purpose this to create vector cleanup areas that we save as more permanent cleanup trim areas.
  • Designed for point clouds
    • Size can be varied by on-screen control or by “[” and “]” keys like Adobe products
    • Ideally using the paint brush also allows for a shading of of elevations that can be set like the shade increment. It would be extremely handy on cleanup
    • Closed dedicated cleanup
• Dynamic point cloud enhancements
  • Capability to sample tighter in dynamic for areas of change. Several variations that could be useful. Especially in Materials

* The ability to use the cut/fill map as a background image

Move imported data to closer question when imported data is over 20,000 feet away from bounding box of existing data.

* Modeling label control change (Gradework and Sitework)

• New/Assign label creation

As the use of orthomosaics and multiple sheet plans grows we really need to refine our image handling beyond the current annotation line, pick to select method. The use of mapping images and large drone orthos from highway projects also hints at a future where we have to tile imagery like SmartDirt (large overall low res, smaller, hir-res tiles when zooming). Breaking this out is step in this direction and should be designed with eventual tiling in mind.

Image boundaries should be their own layer that like benchmarks are independent of surfaces. The

Ideally the image View control is a non-modal so it can be floated on a second window. We need to be able to import and rename the images while retaining the linkage to the original file. We also need to

? Start using tiling for the image views rather than reading the entire bitmap. Would add flexibility to handling of maps and possibly more than one sheet ast onece

I'm going to expand the cleanup tool description beyond just a paintbrush because I think we can dual purpose the tool to both handle the paintbrush technique but also entering line cleanup areas like we do now that automatically close. By integrating these (default paintbrush but toggle to line mode possible) we can still have the feedback desired like point coloring, backgrounds, contours, 3D for both modes.

• View controls (elevation colored or shaded, cut/fill background, contours, 3D)
• Toggle between paintbrush and line cleanup
• Size control for paintbrush
• Color increment for point coloring

Paintbrush cleanup is a long desired point cloud cleanup tool because objects in those clouds are often not conveniently horizontal and vertical. Ideally it would allow varying the brush size interactively (I suggest dedicated, mode specific buttons on the interface and “[” and “]” for keyboard shortcuts.

Dynamic downsampling is a competitive advantage of ours but using it on a variety of jobs and especially Materials is highlighting that the 1 foot sample rate doesn't capture fine detail (curb as an example) well and we could probably stand some variability in the base sample rate although we can still retain the 5 foot grid when the elevation deviation falls under the current threshold. Giving the user control of the sampling retains the real advantage that averaging the millions of points gives but also refines the surface capture.

In testing raw point grids with no downsampling it was apparent that our averaging more often than not smooths surfaces that generate more noise (darker typically) and better represent the actual surface. My proposal is we change the dialog name after choosing dynamic to “Dynamic Settings”, modify the wording from Delta to Elevation filtering and add the capability to increase the grid density in elevation change areas to higher densities. Because we wish to continue using a 5 foot spacing for planar areas and keep the divisor even I propose we not put a number on the grid density settings. Instead we default to “Normal” which is the 1 foot grid and give the option of higher (.5 grid) and highest (.25 grid). This does not change the once every 5 foot spacing but just gives greater possible definition in areas with vertical change over a small area.

The existing dialog looks like this.

The new dialog looks like this (combo closed and open)

A very common scenario is that projects are in local coordinate systems while the ortho and point clouds are almost always in State Plane (world coordinates). We currently accommodate this by making it easy move both the point cloud and ortho together and this is sufficient for one off situations where we're doing just one flight.

It becomes more problematic and complicated if there are multiple flights. Also problematic is the workflow for processing in much of the photogrammetry software where at best you must do multiple processes to tag CP/GCPs.

We have all the information needed as part of benchmarks. Local Coordinate and lat-long can be used to calculate the state plane value and fill in the transformation. The Pix4D requirements look like these.

Modeling features from Jason Lambrecht?