With advanced technology and the use of drones to capture the essence of a project site, the most common misunderstanding people have is that a drone is a replacement for surveyors, which couldn't be further from the truth. The drone is simply a tool that takes photographs or uses lidar to create a digital copy of the terrain. You still need a person, a surveyor, to interpret and create a survey of a project site. When you use Virtual Surveyor, you stay in the mindset of a surveyor and do everything a surveyor does, except you are now surveying from a virtual world.


Overview

    The Basic Virtual Surveyor Concept

            1 - Surveyors in a Virtual World

            2 - Speed Up the Basic Surveyor Method

            3 - Add More Detail to the Surface

    Apply the Basic Surveyor Concept to Multiple Projects

    Additional Capabilities Using Virtual Surveyor


The Basic Virtual Surveyor Concept

Instead of forcing surveyors to become data analysts, we use computer vision technology to create an interactive and fluent environment in the Virtual Surveyor app so that surveyors can do what they do best: survey the terrain. Except you'll do so from a digital copy of the actual terrain with a literal virtual representation (you can create the digital terrain model using our drone photogrammetry Terrain Creator app). 


The drone data by itself is too much for a CAD program to handle, so Virtual Surveyor's terrain engine was designed to specifically handle both large and small digital copies of the terrain from the drone data. We use technology to simplify the process, make surveying faster and more user-friendly, and still able to retain all the data and information needed for survey-grade deliverables. All while making it fun and easy to use with a visually rewarding experience!


1 - Surveyors in a Virtual World

You can use the same concept as the traditional surveying process to gather points on the elevation terrain in a digital environment, as if you were at the project site with boots on the ground.


Survey the virtual elevation terrain. To survey a digital terrain, you ask yourself how you would survey a site if you were there in person, except now you use a visual virtual space and computer tools. To get a better idea of the distancing on the site, we'll turn on the Graticule lens and set the interval to 20m to help us get a better visual of how we would 'walk' the terrain and add points in a grid pattern. Then, enable the Point tool and start placing points every 20 meters in a lawnmower like pattern, avoiding objects like trees, brush, or buildings to ensure all the points are placed at ground level.

Traditional survey method using the Point tool to 'walk' extents across the project site, using the Graticule Lens as a guide for distance.


Create a light-weight surface model. After placing points to survey the digital terrain, we'll create a light-weight surface model as a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN). This is the most basic method for creating a topography in Virtual Surveyor. With the surveyed points, we can easily generate a CAD surface model by triangulating all the survey items.

Use Triangulate All on your survey points to create a surface and view it as a TIN (triangulated irregular network).


Change how you display your surface. By default, the surface is generated and viewed as a TIN. However, we can change the surface to view it as a TIN, contours, or both, and even set the intervals between the contour lines to show more detail.

Change the view your generated surface from a TIN to contours and change the intervals between the contour lines.


You can do an entire survey using the basic method. Our free Valley version of Virtual Surveyor allows you to fully complete a basic survey and generate a deliverable like we've just shown. However, you also have the option to pay for advanced versions of the app that will significantly increase how fast you can complete a survey with the help of advanced Virtual Surveyor tools. 


2 - Speed Up the Basic Surveyor Method

You can use the same basic Virtual Surveyor concept with more intelligent tools, to scale and speed up surveyor methods for larger and more complex areas. You can use a Point Grid tool to have the software place points on the terrain for you. The Low-pass tool intelligently places points at ground level on the elevation model, all while avoiding things like trees, brush, and buildings.


Use intelligent tools. To create a Low-pass point grid, you'll need to draw a boundary around the project area so that the software knows where you want to place the points. After creating the boundary around the site, we'll ensure the point grid is set to Low-Pass, change the grid size to 20 m, and with the click of the Point Grid button, we've created an entire survey in seconds, with all points placed at ground level.

Delete the basic survey. Draw a boundary around the project area and create a Rectangular Point Grid with a spacing of 15m (50ft).


Create and display the surface. Create a new surface from the newly placed points and display it as both the TIN and as contours to get a better visual of all your points.


3 - Add More Detail to the Surface

Now that you've seen how the Low-pass tool works, you can actually use it in a more intelligent way to add even more detail to your surface. Adding more points to the terrain does increase the likelihood of you needing to edit some points to ensure they are all placed at ground level, but it is well worth the trade-off of time added for how quickly you can add significantly more detail to your surface.


Add more detail: To add even more detail, you simply need to place more points. To do this, you lower the spacing between points in your point grid settings. We'll use the same boundary that was used earlier, except now we'll set the spacing to 5 m to create more points on the terrain. With the spacing set to 5 m, we'll create a new grid of points.

Run a Low-pass Point grid at 10m.


With the points generated, it looks like some of the points ended up on objects like buildings and trees. These points need to be removed, but we still want to keep all the additional detail for the terrain. To do this, we'll create a surface from the most recently generated low-pass points and disable both the point grid and the boundary since we don't need those for editing.


Use powerful editing tools and complete your surface. To edit and touch up the surface by removing or moving points where necessary, we'll switch to 2D view, right click on the selected surface and enable Edit Surface, then enable contours to get a better visual of all the points placed in the project site. The tightly formed circular contour lines can help us recognize what points were placed on objects on the terrain because of their sharp increase or decrease in elevation.  

Remove erroneous points from your surface in real-time while displaying both TIN and Contours.


After you're done editing points, the surface is complete!

 

Apply the Basic Surveyor Concept to Multiple Projects

With just a small learning curve, you can use the Virtual Surveyor app to pick the best tool for the job and quickly create a surface for any type of terrain. And, once you understand surveying in a virtual world, you can start working much faster and still achieve accurate, highly detailed results.


Tools and methods for any type of survey:


Additional Capabilities Using Virtual Surveyor

The Virtual Surveyor desktop app capabilities extend beyond the basic Virtual Surveyor concept. While creating topographic surveys is the original functionality of the software, over the years it has grown to be much more capable. Much of the functionality outside of creating a virtual survey enables you to save money from needing to buy other software programs by using the Virtual Surveyor app for a myriad of other drone data applications.


Tools and methods for a user-friendly and high-quality experience across multiple disciplines: