So, two things here.

The morphing of old drawings to new data could have been automated if the
process of sub-selecting from the whole survex dataset could be
formalized.  Only by survex processing the whole cave system and then
snipping out the cave section you want, instead of compiling from some
sub-directory, can you get the legs into their real world positions with
the final loop closures applied.

Secondly, the bezier lines output by tunnelx will be accurate and should
work for Therion.  If the segments are too short and annoying, I could
write a script that takes in a valid therion file, combines them into
longer pieces and outputs them as longer combined splines.  This script
could at least be used for other purposes and would be easier to debug as
you wouldn't need TunnelX to preview the input and output.

But the main issue is -- as Mad Phil has pointed out -- by the time we do
all this and pester one and a half people to train themselves and be
interested in ploughing through all this work to eventually produce an
output after a number of years that's pretty much the same as what you have
already, the era of cheap lidar scans and handy intuitive 3D
representations will be upon us.  So this is a bit like investing time into
a new revised edition of the London A-Z Streetmap booklet just as google
maps and OSMand are coming out on these new-fangled smartphone thingies
that are never going to catch on.

Meantime, I've been practicing the talk I'm giving at the UIS2021
conference in France this month:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOktKq0c7BY

Julian.


On Thu, 30 Jun 2022 at 12:03, Footleg <drfoot...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I did this for some of my Matienzo surveys which I originally started
> drawing in Tunnel before I moved to Therion when the process of morphing
> old drawings onto new data became too time consuming as the project got
> larger. The approach I took was to export the drawings from Tunnel as SVG,
> then process these in Inkscape and save to Therion format using the Therion
> Inkscape plug-in. The main pitfall I found was that the 'click to place
> line points' method of drawing splines in Tunnel had led to much denser
> points per line than typically is the case when drawing in Therion with the
> 'click and drag out handles' method with bezier curves. I found I tended to
> get many short line fragments from the conversion, and tiny line
> fragments overlapping themselves or hidden under other lines. Cleaning
> these up was time consuming, and I eventually concluded I would get better
> drawings by using bitmaps of my Tunnel drawings as background sketches in
> Therion and redrawing them in Therion. Like many big survey projects where
> nobody else seems interested in getting involved beyond the actual caving
> trips it all proved too much work for me alone and after 10 years my
> enthusiasm waned, so much remains to be drawn up still.
>
> Footleg
>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 6:10 PM Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> wrote:
>
>> Has anyone done any work on the task of converting existing Tunnel
>> sketches (xml) to therion .th2 files?
>>
>> CUCC (Cambridge Loser expeditions: https://expo.survex.com) has a huge
>> investment of tunnel drawings (55km of cave?), but because there are
>> no elevations for any of this and Tunnel is a bit niche we are
>> pondering using therion more.
>>
>> If a semi-automated conversion of the existing drawings was possible,
>> that would help enormously.
>>
>> It seems like it shouldn't fundamentally be too hard to turn xml
>> lines/beziers into therion lines/beziers, and map the line types, but
>> there are issues with how to allocate lines to files and how to get
>> the scaling right.
>>
>> I've not done anything at all about it yet, but thought I'd check if
>> anyone else had before having a proper look.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Wookey
>> --
>> Principal hats:  Debian, Wookware, ARM
>> http://wookware.org/
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