Selective DTM Merging

Imagine having multiple surface layers and wanting to merge them selectively, retaining specific areas while excluding others.

To illustrate and describe this process, let's consider a scenario where we have two layers, A (Green) and B (Blue), along with a restricted area (Yellow). In this hypothetical situation, we want to replace the contents of layer B with green, except within the yellow outline (restricted).

Our initial step is to export both A and B surfaces in the Micromine format, resulting in two separate data files for triangles and points (File > Export > Export Wireframes).

Next, we create an outline for our blue (B) surface using the Wireframe Silhouette tool (Wireframe > Generate Strings > Wireframe Silhouette). The cyan color represents this outline in the image.

Following this, we need to attribute all the points we've exported for both A and B surfaces so that we have attributes to work with in the next steps. We begin by attributing the points in A (Green) with information from B and the restricted outlines (Design > Polygon Tools > Polygon Assign).

Similarly, we attribute the points in B (Blue) with information from the restricted area (Design > Polygon Tools > Polygon Assign).

Now, we generate new files using the Subset tool based on the output of the previous steps. First, we subset points from A where the domains are not in B, and we also subset points from B where the domains are not restricted (File > Filter > Subset File).

To consolidate these subsets, we use the Merge Files action to combine the coordinates and domain fields of both (File > Actions > Merge Files).

Finally, we can create the desired DTM based on the merged points from the previous steps, which include A (excluding B) and B (excluding the restricted area) (Grid/DTM > DTM Create > New DTM).

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