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Michael Kinnear/4 min read

Refining Surface Contour Lines for Better Visualization

Contour Refinement Tools

Smoothing

Surface Properties > Definition > Smoothing for cleaner contours.

Major/Minor Intervals

Adjust contour interval for desired density.

Boundary Refinement

Boundaries (outer or hide) limit where contours appear.

Edit TIN

Manually flip or remove triangles for problem areas.

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This tutorial walks through refining surface contour lines for better visualization, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Now that we have this surface that we've created, we're going to go ahead and do a couple of edits to it so that we can make sure that we're getting these contour lines that are kind of running off taken care of. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to expand out Surfaces**.

We're going to go to our Dev Branch Grad and we're going to go ahead and right-click and select Surface Properties**. We're going to go to our Surface Styles and we're going to create a new surface style. We're going to call this new surface style Edit and we're going to go to Display and we're going to turn on Triangles and Points**.

So once we've done that, I'm going to go ahead and hit Apply and hit OK**. We're going to have the Edit style selected. We're going to hit Apply and hit OK**.

And so from here, what we can see is that we do have quite a few TIN lines that are spanning between our retaining walls. We need to clean those up, and also we've got some TIN lines that are crossing through our corridor or through our cul-de-sac. To edit these out, I'm going to go ahead and select the surface.

I'm going to go up into the contextual ribbon bar for Edit Surface**. I'm going to go ahead and go to my Delete Line option. I'm going to then drop a window crossing across some of these lines and I'm going to hit ENTER**, and then I'm going to do it again and hit ENTER**, and I'm going to zoom in and do it again and hit ENTER**.

And then I'm going to go into this section here, hit ENTER for that. I'm going to pan out over here, get in here, get rid of that line, get rid of that line. I'm going to come in here and get rid of this line here.

I'll probably get rid of this one too. Move into here and clear that one out as well. Now we've got a pretty good approximation of that curve in that retaining wall.

We don't have any spanning lines across through here. So I'm going to go over and clean up my cul-de-sac now. So I'm doing a window crossing here, hitting ENTER**, doing a window crossing here, hitting ENTER**, window crossing through this line, hitting ENTER**, just continuing to refine and zoom in as I go.

I'm going to do a window crossing here. I'm going to go ahead and actually get rid of this one as well. Then I'm going to go ahead and start taking care of these.

I'm doing a window crossing through here and then I will go ahead and do a window crossing through there. And now we have a pretty good approximation through here. It looks like we've got a little bit of cleanup left here, so I'm going to do another window crossing here.

And I feel pretty good about how the rest of this is going. Maybe I want to clean up these last couple of lines there. And I think we're good.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape**. I'm going to hit Escape again. I'm going to change the style for my surface.

So I'm going to go to Dev Branch Grad**, right-click, Surface Properties**. I'm going to go ahead and drop down and get out of Edit and go back to my Design Topo**, hit Apply**, hit OK**.

Now we're not seeing those wispy contour lines coming out and not connecting to anything. If I select this surface and I go to my Object Viewer and I bring my Object Viewer over here and expand it out and rotate out my view, what we're going to see is we now have a clear definition of the edge of our corridor here, our cul-de-sac.

We have this retaining wall. These little things that are showing up are issues related to the TIN lines and not closing out, but that's okay because what we're going to end up doing is pasting this surface into another surface, and then it will be fine. So I feel good with everything that we have so far.

I'm going to go ahead and hit Escape**. I'm going to zoom out so that I can see the whole drawing. I'm going to save this drawing, and then I will meet you in the next video.