Designed Finished Surface Area

Hi Bernard 

Welcome to the forums and thank you for your questions.

(1) what is 2D / 3D area of cut/fill? 

This is an area we are going to be improving in the 2018 release actually.  Currently if you take all the earthworks in a proposed phase (this isn't necessarily the same as what is contained in the perimeters of the earthworks elements as it includes generated side slopes and excludes areas that result in zero cut fill) then you have with two areas.  The surface area (3D area) and the area as would be measured of a paper plan (2D area).  I sometimes explain it in relation to turfing an undulating golf course.  The 2D area looking down from above would not give you the area of turf you would need as dramatic undulation would require far more turf than flat areas.  Therefore the 3D area is needed for that calculation.  This whole feature of the program is to be improved upon with the introduction of separate calculation 'regions' that can be specified and perhaps later on in the year 'area take-off'.  

(2) Is it possible for Kubla Cubed to provide finished surface areas after completion of earthwork model / calculation. We need this because we need to estimate liner area on the completed designed surface in some of our projects.

I think effectively this is the 3D area I was talking about before, the golf course scenario is just as true with water proofing liners for retention ponds etc...  A problem might arise if you have defined the pond and other earthworks in the same phase as the phases 3D area reports the value for all earthworks disturbance areas.  This will ultimately be resolved with the earthworks 'regions' update in the 2018 release but for now a trick that some users are using is to create a separate phase with a overlay or strip element over the area they want to measure.  Make sure the batter is set to 0.01 to eliminate side slopes and set the depth or height to the same.  Obviously you ignore the cut\fill on this phase as we are just using it to measure, the 3D\2D area reported will be separate as it is the only element on the phase. Make sure you delete this 'measure' phase before creating any subsequent earthworks phases though. 

(3) Is that possible to get a retaining wall element as input format in proposed level instead of using "break line" method. This will greatly eliminate errors in modeling the retaining wall.

I know this was being discussed, I will add it to the list of user suggestions and try to get it on the road map for you.  I remember the developer of the calculation engine saying it was something he wanted to include.

(4) What is the maximum survey points / contour that the program can handle ? I asked because we have a big survey files (5m grid interval in 2km x 2km area) that need to model but the program seemed too big to handle.

It depends greatly on how powerful your computer is.  I would say over 70,000 points and the same with contours (contours with over 70,000 points total) the program will start to struggle.  We do have performance improvements planned in the future though and there are some tips I can offer :

With a point cloud like you describe (160,000 points) the program can thin thin this down using an algorithm we have developed.  It is the same with contour lines, the program has a tool for removing points using a given tolerance.  This tools will become available when you import large data sets into the program.    Another thing some people do with drone data is to generate contour lines from it in in another program (this is usually available in point cloud processing programs) and then import the contours into the program.  

In addition what takes a long time to calculate at the moment is an outline set to "Extrapolate from other features" this one is much slower than the others.   I would suggest with large data sets using the Automatic Outline as this is much quicker to calculate.  

(5) Can you provide the User Manual in detail explaining the technology adopted for this program as we need to know the basic theory and to explain to our client.

There is a user manual with the program Help->User Manual.  We are currently working on uploading that online but at the moment unfortunately it is offline only.  In answer to your question about the theory behind the program we have written an article that might help : How to Calculate Cut and Fill  if you scroll to the bottom there is a section on using the 'Triangle Prism' method used by Kubla Cubed (and are marine dredging software Kubla Ports).  Two TINS are generated (in Kubla Cubed this is done for each phase) one for the existing and one for the proposed.  The triangle vertices and edges are stamped from one TIN to the other, this process is called 'merging'.  We now have a situation whereby each triangle has its counterpart on the other TIN, all triangles are in pairs - existing and proposed.  Now we can use triangle prism volume calculations on each of the pairs in turn to build the final volume.  This we consider to be the most mathematically complete model when using TINS and is developed in-house.  It results usually in millions of calculations hence will never be suggested as method to use manually.

We also have other technologies that are used on top of this process to combine earthworks elements together to form a 'proposed surface' and to generate side slopes to meet the proposed to the ground.  Arguably the side slope generation is the most difficult of them all to implement. Let me know if you want any further information about this.  We did a video on side slope here although for designing ponds you might be using the 'Ground Level' outlines which is the one scenario whereby side slopes are not used. 

-Ted