Terrain Modelling
GDAL utilities
TerrainTool
A simple java app that makes terrain models in less than a minute, designed for use with survex and therion.
Surface Profiles
To create surface profiles, you can string together a series of regularly spaced fixed surface points from, either a gps overland trail (lat long elev), a series of points manually extracted from Google Earth, or generated with the help of http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/elevation
To use GPSVisualizer
- export a kml model of your cave (or a simplified representation) with therion
- Upload the kml file to the online GPSVisualizer tool and request plain text output (it will replace the cave elevations with ground surface elevations)
- copy-paste the data back into therion as fixed stations
- join the fixed stations with nosurvey legs
A hint at how to get all these fixed point into a form that looks like a survey centreline in therion…
centreline cs lat-long grade BCRA3
walls off mark temporary flags surface # station-names 4wd01 [] # to avoid name clashes if required
fix 1 -42.0001724 171.9024155 572.6 fix 2 -42.00020492 171.9022789 574.04 fix 3 -42.00021414 171.9021513 574.04 fix 4 -42.00026879 171.9020413 575.01 fix 5 -42.00030752 171.901925 575.01 #thousands of these, they are decimal degrees and metres
data nosurvey from to 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 #thousands of these as well, a spreadsheet makes them easy to generate
endcentreline
#Then just select this survey along with your cave when processing