TIN Surfaces in Viizor

You have a point cloud. Your client needs a surface. Maybe it's for volume calculation. Maybe it's for cut/fill analysis. Maybe they just need contour lines to overlay on their site plan. Whatever the reason, the request is the same: turn that cloud of millions of points into something usable.

This is where TIN surfaces come in. And in Viizor Desktop, creating them takes minutes instead of hours.

The Surface Your Client Is Waiting For

Let's skip the theory and talk about real work.

Create a surface from any area you define

You draw a polygon around your area of interest. Viizor analyzes the point cloud inside that boundary and generates a Triangulated Irregular Network. The surface appears immediately in your 3D view, ready to work with.

No export. No import into another program. No waiting for batch processing. Draw the area, get the surface.

Generate contour lines instantly

Once you have a TIN, contour lines are one click away. Set your interval — 0.5 meters, 1 meter, 5 feet, whatever your project requires — and the contours appear on the surface.

Major contours (typically every 5th line) are drawn thicker for easy reading. The colors are configurable. And because the contours are generated from the actual surface geometry, they follow the terrain accurately.

Clean up problem areas without starting over

Real terrain has complications. Maybe there's a building that created some weird triangles. Maybe the edge of your survey area has elongated triangles reaching into nowhere.

In Viizor, you hover over any triangle edge and right-click to delete it. The surface updates. No need to regenerate the entire TIN, no need to go back to your points and edit them. Just remove what doesn't belong.

Made a mistake? Ctrl+Z brings back the last edge you deleted. Up to 10 levels of undo.

Export to formats your CAD software understands

When the surface is ready, export it as LandXML. Civil 3D imports it directly. The contours export as DXF with proper layer organization — major contours on one layer, minor on another.

Your deliverable is ready for the next step in the workflow.

What You Can Actually Do with TINs in Viizor

The Workflow for Stockpile Volumes

Here's a concrete example: you need to calculate the volume of three stockpiles on a job site.

The volume calculation happens against a reference plane or another surface. The result includes surface area, volume, and if you selected a material density, the estimated tonnage.

The Workflow for Earthwork Analysis

You flew a drone survey last month. You flew another one this week. The contractor wants to know how much dirt moved.

In Viizor:

1. Load both point clouds
2. Create TIN surface from first survey (baseline)
3. Create TIN surface from second survey (current)
4. Run Surface Compare → Cut/Fill analysis
5. See exactly where material was added and where it was removed

The comparison uses a prismatic method that calculates the volume between surfaces cell by cell. Cut areas show in one color, fill areas in another. The numbers are broken out separately.

Export the results as a report. Export the comparison surface as LandXML if you need it in Civil 3D.

The Workflow for Topographic Deliverables

Your client needs a topo plan. They need it by Friday.

The fast path:

1. Load point cloud (already classified for ground)
2. Filter to show only ground points
3. Draw AOI polygon around the project boundary
4. Generate TIN from ground points
5. Create contours at 1-meter intervals (or whatever spec requires)
6. Export TIN as LandXML, contours as DXF
7. Import both into your CAD drawing
8. Add annotation and titleblock

The heavy lifting — surface creation and contour generation — happens in Viizor in minutes. The drafting work still happens in your CAD software, but you're starting with clean geometry instead of millions of points.

Working with Existing Survey Points

Sometimes you don't want an automatic surface. You want control over exactly which points define your TIN.

Viizor supports this too. You can:

• Place points manually at specific locations
• Use the Sparks tool to automatically generate topographic points at regular intervals
• Import existing points from your total station or GNSS survey

Once you have points, select them and generate a TIN. The surface forms from exactly the points you chose, nothing more.

This is useful when you need the TIN to match traditional survey methodology — points at grade breaks, points along features, points at regular intervals on flat areas.

Edge Deletion: The Feature You Didn't Know You Needed

Automatic triangulation has a problem: it connects everything. If your survey boundary is irregular, you'll get long skinny triangles reaching across gaps where there's no real data.

Most software requires you to define breaklines or boundaries before creating the surface. Miss one, and you're regenerating everything.

Viizor takes a different approach: create the surface with all triangles, then delete the bad ones.

Hover over any edge. It highlights in red. Right-click. It's gone. The surface updates immediately.

Contour Options That Matter

Contour generation has a few settings worth mentioning:

Interval: The vertical distance between contour lines. Set this to match your project requirements.

Major interval: How often to draw a thicker "index" contour. Typically every 5th line (1-meter contours with index at 5 meters), but configurable.

Smoothing: Contour lines can be angular where they cross triangle edges, or smoothed using interpolation. Smoothing looks better on plans but takes slightly longer to generate.

Colors: Minor and major contours can have different colors. Brown is traditional for topographic work, but you might want something else for specific deliverables.

What Happens Under the Hood (Briefly)

When you create a TIN, Viizor runs Delaunay triangulation to connect your points. This mathematical process creates triangles where no point lies inside the circumcircle of any triangle — in practical terms, it creates well-shaped triangles that represent terrain accurately.

For contour generation, the algorithm walks through each triangle and finds where horizontal planes at your specified elevations intersect the triangle edges. These intersection points become the contour lines.

The process is optimized to handle surfaces with thousands of points. Progress indicators show you what's happening during generation.

You don't need to know any of this to use the tool. But it's there if you're curious why the results look the way they do.

Memory Considerations

TIN surfaces with lots of points consume memory. Viizor will warn you if you're about to generate more than 5,000 points in a single surface.

Integration with the Rest of Viizor

TIN surfaces created in Viizor work with the rest of the toolset:

• Volume Calculator: Use TINs as reference surfaces for stockpile calculations
• Surface Compare: Compare two TINs for cut/fill analysis
• Export Tools: Send TINs to LandXML, contours to DXF
• Project Versions: Save your work state including TINs for later revision

Everything stays in one application until you're ready to export.

Time Saved Is Money Earned

Let's be direct about the value proposition.

Creating a TIN surface in traditional desktop software might take 30-60 minutes by the time you've imported data, set up boundaries, defined parameters, generated the surface, and cleaned up problems.

In Viizor, the same work takes 5-10 minutes. Draw polygon, generate surface, delete a few bad edges, generate contours, export.

If you process even two or three surfaces per week, that time difference adds up. Over a month, you're looking at hours saved. Over a year, it's significant.

And because Viizor is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, you're not paying monthly for access to that productivity.

Getting Started

TIN tools are part of Viizor Desktop's standard feature set. No additional modules, no feature unlocks.

Load a point cloud. Draw a polygon. Generate a surface. That's it.

If you've been exporting point clouds to other software just to create surfaces, try doing it directly in Viizor. The workflow is faster than you expect.