Friday, September 14, 2012

'LSS Toolbar' Productivity Hints

Usual way of 'LSS Toolbar' typical tool processing has following steps:

  • activate a tool dialog
  • pick all necessary entites in an active model one by one
  • adjust then apply settings to generate results
But actually it is possible to select all necessary entities before tool activation if you know in advance what entites are needed for tool processing. The more entities are to be picked the more handy 'preseleciton feature' becomes, because it is possible to select all necessary stuff at once using selection rectangle instead of picking objects one by one.
'Make 3D Mesh' tool demonstrates 'preselection trick' advantage in a most clear way when it is necessary to make terrain surface from existing point cloud. Preselection becomes actually the only reasonable way to solve such task when point cloud has hundreds or thousands of points.



Note that obtaining a point cloud from CSV file feature added in 'beta 1' of 'LSS Toolbar 2.0'.
It is not an intellectual CSV parser yet, so this functionality has a lot of limitations and it processes only properly formatted CSV files. Appropriate file has to contain only XYZ values separated by comma.
Here is an overview of steps to prepare CSV file for processing with 'LSS Toolbar' when it does not match required formatting.

The sample of digital elevation data stored in a CSV file:


1. First of all it is necessary to import this file into spreadsheet application.

2. Leave only 3 columns with XYZ values


3. Erase rows, which have no XYZ values


4. Rearrange columns so that first column has X-values, second has Y-values, third has Z-values


5. Save table as CSV file and it is ready to import in SketchUp








No comments:

Post a Comment