Workspaces – Editing the Terrain

Workspaces let you change the terrain model and observe the effects on the analyses. You access these editing tool through the following steps:

1. Select the toolbox icon by the workspace you want to edit
2. Select the Elevation tab
3. Choose the editing tool you want to work with.

There are several different types of tools. Most of the the tools create terrain edit features that are used to modify the terrain or the resulting analyses, they are described in separate sections of this manual. The last tool allows you select existing features and modify them in several ways, that tool is described in this section.

The three categories of tools for creating new terrain edit features are:

Simple terrain tools

The simple terrain tools: Allows you to edit the terrain along paths and polygons. Despite the name they can be quite powerful.

Subsurface tools

The subsurface terrain tools allows you to subsurface basins and structures for routing and storing water without changing the elevation model.

Contour tools

The contour tools lets create and modify contours to sculpt the terrain to your needs.

Modifying features

You modify existing features using the select tool. It lets you select any of the features in the workspace. Once selected, the position of any vertex of a feature can be changed interactively by dragging the vertex. New vertices can be created by clicking anywhere on the feature boundary, while vertices can be deleted by clicking on the vertex with the ctrl-key held down. You can also move an entire feature by clicking and dragging it in the interior of an area feature or by holding the shift-key while clicking.

When selecting a feature, the path info dialog appears in the bottom right corner and enables you to:

• Change the feature's attributes, such as the width of a path, the elevation of a contour, or a comment explaining the purpose of the feature.
  
• Access the profile tool, where you can fine-tune the elevation of each vertex of the feature - see below.
• Show you the area of an area feature.
• Change the edit method (only available for the simple tools):
  • When the edit mode is raise & lower, the tool will raise or lower the current terrain elevation as necessary to create the feature. This is the default for the interpolate path tool.
    
  • When the edit mode is set to only raise, the tool will never decrease any elevation value. In other words, it "adds" material to the terrain, never "removes" material. This is the default for the raise path and raise flat path or area tools
    
  • When the edit mode is set to only lower, then the tool will never increase any elevation value. In other words, it "removes" material from the terrain, never "adds" material. This is the default for the lower path and lower flat path or area tools.

Depending on the type of feature selected some of the options above might not be available.

You can delete an entire feature by pressing delete in the path info dialog.

Once you have selected a feature, a context menu becomes available for this feature. Right-click on the selected feature to access the context menu. It provides some of the actions also available in the path info dialog, as well as actions to modify the cross sections of the feature - see below.

Undo and Redo

You can undo your modifications to the workspace one step at a time, using the green undo button. Once you have undone a modification, you can perform it again using the redo button below.

Only modifications that are less than one week old can be undone. The buttons are grayed out when no modification can be undone or redone.

The profile tool

The profile tool is used to modify the elevations of the vertices of a feature. You can use it in parallel with modifying the geometry of the path on the map (the profile tool updates itself whenever you move, insert, or delete a vertex of the path feature on the map). When you save your path modifications, the updated elevations are saved as well.

The feature context menu

Once you have selected a feature using the select tool, you can right-click it to bring up the feature's context menu: