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.
In the Survex/Tunnel workflow, you use Survex to manage your survey data (centreline plus passage width/height data). This produces a 3D model of the survey line. Tunnel is the drawing program which the final map is created with. It understands that the centreline is positioned in 3D, so when drawing passage features you attach them to the centreline for that passage. Tunnel can then determine the elevation of that passage, and correctly position overlapping passages above or below it as appropriate. Any morphing of the map only takes into account the position of survey stations for the survey in that passage. So levels above or below a level that is moved will not be affected. To make it easier to draw passages where there are other overlapping passages there are options to hide any details which are not at a similar elevation to the part of the cave you are working on. Alternatively, you can draw up a passage in a separate sketch containing just the centreline for that passage, and then import this into the master sketch later.
Finally when rendering the map you can set styles for named areas of the sketch, allowing you to render different parts of the cave semi-invisible to show detail in other layers. You can apply different styles to the same sketch, rendering two versions of it in the same master drawing in order to show the detail at different levels. See this example as it is easier to show that describe!
http://www.darkgem.com/wscc/matienzo/map/sitesmap.htm?lat=43.33593&lon=-3.56422&zoom=19
(Ignore the rotation of the box around the inset area where the upper levels are made less visible. This was due to a quick and dirty skewing of the renderer map in photoshop to make the cave fit a different North reference. I'll fix it up properly at some point.)
Unfortunately Tunnel does not yet support elevation sketches, but they should be being added in due course.