Cave survey programs that adjust features

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Aaron Addison » May 29, 2009 2:11 pm

Spike is correct. None of the current software will address 3D issues in morphing. None seem to work with profile data either.

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Martin Sluka » May 29, 2009 2:20 pm

Aaron Addison wrote:Spike is correct. None of the current software will address 3D issues in morphing. None seem to work with profile data either.

AA


Aaron, I don't understand the Spike's problem very well (too english for me, sorry). What you mean 3D issues in morfing?
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Jeff Bartlett » May 29, 2009 3:18 pm

Aaron Addison wrote:Spike is correct. None of the current software will address 3D issues in morphing. None seem to work with profile data either.


Stan, haven't you been drafting Dry cave as separate levels and using the #segment command to delineate levels? I can't remember whether we discussed it specifically, but does this successfully isolate, say, a point on level 2 from being inappropriately affected by a vector adjustment (& artwork correction) directly above or below it on another level?

PS - Spike, are you roundtripping Bruce Cave?
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Spike » May 29, 2009 5:27 pm

Sluka,

In the SVG/Walls Round tripping process, if an upper level passage moves due to a change in survey, the lower level passage is also moved even with no change in survey.

Jeff,

Yes, when I got the older data to start working I had a compass error on the 4th shot of 2 miles of survey. It would be months before I could go into the cave so I drew the cave with the bad data and let the round tripping fix the map after I was able to return to the cave and fix the error. With the round tripping process having bad data that skews the map is no excuse for not drawing up the good stuff. The only really challenge to keeping a working map current is the actual drawing, rather than holding back waiting for fixing bad loops, poor backsights, etc. . . Hopefully this will help cure the cave surveyed, not drafted rash that goes around.

I have so many caves with a drafting backlog due to past waiting for the above excuses that I went from nothing to draw, pre round tripping, to miles behind today. Right now I am working on several maps in Parallel. I draw one "screens" worth of passage on one map and then switch maps. I find this very rewarding and breaks up drawing the same type of passage all the time.
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Martin Sluka » May 30, 2009 2:55 am

Spike wrote:Sluka,In the SVG/Walls Round tripping process, if an upper level passage moves due to a change in survey, the lower level passage is also moved even with no change in survey.

Yes, when I got the older data to start working I had a compass error on the 4th shot of 2 miles of survey. It would be months before I could go into the cave so I drew the cave with the bad data and let the round tripping fix the map after I was able to return to the cave and fix the error. With the round tripping process having bad data that skews the map is no excuse for not drawing up the good stuff. The only really challenge to keeping a working map current is the actual drawing, rather than holding back waiting for fixing bad loops, poor backsights, etc. . . Hopefully this will help cure the cave surveyed, not drafted rash that goes around.


Spike, for the hell, way you don't do it in therion? NO ANY problems with round tripping process, and many, many more features how to interpret your data compared to SVG/Wall. You will find the recipe how to transfer data from SVG to therion format in therion wiki. One of the main features is that several surveyors may work on one project, and therion will join the data. On correct place, with independent morfing (http://therion.speleo.sk/samples.doc/10.html), in the same design, ... Check klisura.speleo.sk - there are files from 6 cavers, each one drawn his parts only.

And I'm sure that with help of JavaScript one may transfer drawn maps from therion to SVG and from SVG to therion.

But I wrote this many times here...

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Jeff Bartlett » May 30, 2009 1:05 pm

Spike wrote:With the round tripping process having bad data that skews the map is no excuse for not drawing up the good stuff. The only really challenge to keeping a working map current is the actual drawing, rather than holding back waiting for fixing bad loops, poor backsights, etc. . . Hopefully this will help cure the cave surveyed, not drafted rash that goes around.


Agreed! I drew the 2-mile stretch of Logsdon/X-Loop on the Big Rift quad and then removed a 30-year-old survey with no vertical control whatsoever that was mucking up the whole thing; I was waiting for a resurvey to pick up a tie station before I could yank it out of there.
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Stan Allison » May 31, 2009 2:21 pm

Hi Jeff,

Yes, I do divide the Dry Cave data up into six separate stratigraphic/cartographic levels using the #Segment command in Walls. When I first started drafting Dry Cave using the Walls/Illustrator/SVG roundtripping process, I was concerned that roundtripping changes in an upper/lower level would cause an undesirable change in an upper/lower level. By dividing the map into six levels I have avoided any potential problems. It is quite easy to combine the separate levels into a single map when desired. Incidentally, the Walls #Segment command is a really useful tool.

Ahoj Sluka,

We both agree that having cave maps that match the survey data is the way to go. You have chosen Therion and I have chosen WALLS/Illustrator/SVG. I have seen demonstrations of Therion and it seems that it is very good software, but the drawing part of the program doesn't seem to have nearly as many features as Illustrator does. This makes sense because cavers don't have the resources that Adobe has to develop software. I am sure that there are many advantages of Therion over WALLS/Illustrator/SVG, but I prefer the Walls/Illustrator method because the drawing part of the process uses more advanced drawing software (Illustrator).

Regardless of which platform is chosen, I really think that some sort of roundtripping such as Therion or Walls/Illustrator/SVG is the method that that most project cave cartographers will be using in the future to draft cave maps. I hope that other cave survey software programmers will start creating their own versions of roundtripping and contributing to this process. It solves so many cave cartography problems that have caused cartographers to never get around to drafting a map. I agree with Spike, there no longer is a good excuse to procrastinate drafting a map of that cave project that has loop closures errors or other problems.

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Jeff Bartlett » May 31, 2009 2:35 pm

Stan Allison wrote:Yes, I do divide the Dry Cave data up into six separate stratigraphic/cartographic levels using the #Segment command in Walls. When I first started drafting Dry Cave using the Walls/Illustrator/SVG roundtripping process, I was concerned that roundtripping changes in an upper/lower level would cause an undesirable change in an upper/lower level. By dividing the map into six levels I have avoided any potential problems. It is quite easy to combine the separate levels into a single map when desired. Incidentally, the Walls #Segment command is a really useful tool.


Do you roundtrip the levels separately? I can't remember :big grin:

What about the tie-stations? For example, if station A31 is the threshhold between level 3 and level 4, and there is a change nearby on level 3 that causes it to move, how does it still line up properly? Do you have to use the #FIX directive to prevent this from happening?
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Footleg » Jun 1, 2009 4:24 am

I must admit I am a bit lost in the terminology being used in this discussion, and what exactly round tripping is meaning. But the Tunnel program which I use in conjunction with Survex morphs the map to take into account loop closures and error corrections without any bit problems. The Survex program repositions stations by distributing loop errors around the loops to give a best fit for the data. Tunnel takes the 3D coordinates of the stations from Survex and plots the plan map of the cave. When you draw the map you attach the passages to the centreline, so if the centreline is later moved, then your map is morphed to match the updated centreline position. So one level of the map will only cause changes in another level of the map if the levels are connected by survey legs in that area. This should in theory work for elevation sketches also, but Tunnel does not yet have support for generating elevations to sketch around. You can do it manually by importing elevation coordinates for the centreline from a text file to generate an elevation view of the centreline, but it is a pretty manual process.

So in Tunnel you can sketch any surveyed part of a cave at any time, and import it into a master cave sketch of the whole system later. No need to wait for data corrections before drawing up.
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Spike » Jun 1, 2009 7:53 am

Footleg,

A good description of the SVG Roundtripping process is available at the following link

http://www.cavediggers.com/techsurvey.pdf

Also, you are effectively doing the same thing using Survex and Tunnel, but like Stan said, with Illustrator we are using a commercial drawing program to do our artwork. I could be drawing maps right now using ArcGIS but it would be tedious and I would not be happy with the lack of style on the resulting map.

Also many mappers involved with CRF activities here in Missouri and elsewhere started using Illustrator to draw maps before other options were available. So there is a legacy reason as well.
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Martin Sluka » Jun 1, 2009 8:33 am

Only one more philosophical than technical note: There is a difference if the map is final product or map and the digital data on which it is based is something as archive of informations about the particular cave.

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Footleg » Jun 2, 2009 8:28 am

Spike wrote:Footleg,

A good description of the SVG Roundtripping process is available at the following link

http://www.cavediggers.com/techsurvey.pdf

Also, you are effectively doing the same thing using Survex and Tunnel, but like Stan said, with Illustrator we are using a commercial drawing program to do our artwork.


Thanks for that link. That was an interesting explanation. I guess what I am doing in Survex/Tunnel is like round tripping without the round trip! In effect I have the drawing program and map building capabilities all in the one application (Tunnel). I can see various pros and cons to the two approaches (Illustrator/Walls vs Survex/Tunnel). From the Tunnel side of things, there are the advantages that the drawing program already supports all the cave symbols and features automatic layout of repeating symbols for area fills (like boulders, pebbles, water, sand, sumps, mud, etc.) and the fact that all the software is free, so anyone can work on the project without having to purchase commercial software. Obviously Illustrator will provide a much more developed drawing capability because it is a commercially developed and widely used application. But Tunnel has one other key advantage in that it is being constantly updated to support features requested by cavers for cave maps. The options for rendering maps are tailored directly to handle the problems of multi layered cave systems, where the caves are not truly separate layers, but interconnected series of passages which join in some places but then run up and over one another in other places.
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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Stan Allison » Jun 3, 2009 1:28 pm

Jeff wrote:

Do you roundtrip the levels separately? I can't remember

What about the tie-stations? For example, if station A31 is the threshhold between level 3 and level 4, and there is a change nearby on level 3 that causes it to move, how does it still line up properly? Do you have to use the #FIX directive to prevent this from happening?


Yes, I do roundtrip the levels separately.

As for tie in-stations, if A31 is the threshold between level 3 and level 4 and I roundtrip the level 3 map which causes the level 3 map to shift, it may not line up until I also roundtrip the level 4 map. However once I roundtrip the level 4 map with the latest data, it will match the level 3 data. Hope this makes sense. Since the Dry Cave map I am working on is an ongoing project I'm not at all worried about the levels not matching up all of the time. When I get to the point of producing a final map, then I will be careful to make sure that all of the levels are round-tripped with the latest data.

For those who are following this discussion and not sure what we are talking about this may help:
When Walls adjusts a cave map exported from Illustrator, it adjusts the cave walls and detail based on the nearest survey station and survey line in PLAN view and doesn't take into account that the nearest station may be in a lower/higher level passage. While I have never experimented with this happening myself, I decided to avoid having to deal with this potential problem by dividing the Dry Cave map up into levels. In reality, the map needed to be divided up into levels anyway as it would be impossible to properly draft the cave without dividing it up into the six major levels of cave development. Hope this clears things up a bit.

So my question to Therion and Survex/Tunnel users is do these programs actually adjust the cave map based on the actual survey line or just the nearest survey station/line as in Walls/Illustrator? Will they also work for profiles? Walls/Illustrator will only roundtrip plan views at this point.

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Martin Sluka » Jun 3, 2009 4:56 pm

Stan Allison wrote:
So my question to Therion and Survex/Tunnel users is do these programs actually adjust the cave map based on the actual survey line or just the nearest survey station/line as in Walls/Illustrator? Will they also work for profiles? Walls/Illustrator will only roundtrip plan views at this point.
Stan


If you check the http://therion.speleo.sk/samples.doc there are examples of what we say "morfing". The map in the therion is divided to small parts "scraps" and if I draw the map, I'm focused only on particular scrap, I don't care what is above or bellow. The scrap is "calibrated" by stations in it. STRUCTURE of scraps and maps is independent of structure of surveyed data. Therion will morf the scraps according to calculated coordinates of stations. You may export morfed sketches and use them as background for drawing too. The scraps are joined together and therion will try to do this join as smooth as possible. In real world, if the sketches are not from older drawn map one must edit the ends of scraps. The join command is not only for walls, but any point of any line could be connected to any point or of any point of any line of second scrap. It means you may join the passage starting among blocks to two edges of blocks and if the blocks move because of morfing, the beginning of joined passage will move too.

Morfing works in plan and in sections too. The profiles are "calibrated" to real proportions, so they are "morfed" too. For old map without any data is enough to have coordinates of entrance, scale bar and orientation to North. The declination is calculated automatically according date of surveying but it could be switch off, ...

If your data are processed in another program, it is enough to import to therion calculated 3D data (xyz coordinates of each station) and next time you import actualized data, therion will move particular stations to new coordinates and morf scraps according to new data.

The maps contain in first level scraps, but they may contain another maps too. So you may use very complicated structure of maps and submaps for your system. The higher level maps could represent the layers.

And so on.

Martin

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Re: Cave survey programs that adjust features

Postby Aaron Addison » Jun 4, 2009 10:01 pm

This is an excellent conversation. I am sorry that I have been too busy with work and ICS cartography to keep up!

We seem to have a pretty good handle on the PLAN view of in-cave sketching and "round tripping". Interestingly, one could also use these features out of the cave in conjunction with scanned survey notes to draft a cave map.

Now the cutting edge has been pushed back once again. There have been several mentions of the need to support PROFILE (and I'll throw in x-secs for good measure). Beyond these basic support items, I find that the existing workflows seem to work best when there the sketcher:survey relationship is at 1:1. What happens to round tripping when you have multiple teams in the cave surveying? How to best merge their sketches (read Adobe AI files in the case of Walls) back together? How then to take the merged product back into the cave at a later date? What about leapfrog surveys?

I think that this is perhaps the most interesting time to be involved with cave survey. Not since the invention of the compass and tape has there been so much excitement (and in my opinion improvement) in cave survey.

Cheers,

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