There have been vast improvements in the ways that pit surfaces or topographic surfaces are being surveyed, such as the introduction of drones or UAV technology. Collecting survey point cloud data using drones can generate highly accurate results, as points that are closer to one another can be collected with ease as opposed to traditional survey methods.

This type of high precision data often requires either more memory space or for the file size to be reduced. Today’s post will demonstrate how to reduce the file size through the use of Solids > Edit Objects > Delete Redundant Points.

Alternatively, see how to remove redundant points after intersections, outersections or unions

This will delete all point data that has no triangle vertices, reducing the overall file size.When these surfaces are used to generate solids of pits, the generated solids still have the points of the high precision surfaces used.

This functionality is targeted at everyone who uses Surpac Surfaces or Solids functionalities, such as geologists, surveyors and mine planners.

An example can be seen below where a surveyed topographic surface and pit design was used to generate a pit solid.

The resulting pit solid looks like this:

With the solid displayed in the Graphics window, do the following:

1. Display Strings as lines
   Notice that the points/string data of the files exist in the resulting solid, which makes the file bigger.
2. In order to delete the additional unused points, use Solid > Edit Objects > Delete Redundant Points.
   
   By using this Surpac function, the redundant points are removed and the file decreases in size. For this example, over 74% of the points were deleted.

   
   This is a significant reduction of the size of the file, and therefore less memory will be consumed when using this file for further analysis such as volume report or constraining.

   The Delete Redundant Points can be used as a tool to reduce the size of generated surfaces and/or solids. This is an existing function within Surpac, so there is no need for additional modules to use the tool.

We hope you found this tip useful. The next Surpac release will have additional tools to autofix problematic solids and will feature licensing changes to mesh tools to make them more accessible. Mesh tools can expand and contract as well as simplify solids and surfaces.

Read more on removing redundant points after intersections, outersections or unions in Surpac.