Mark is always looking out for his Zen Friends.  He is sometimes asked to help out on a project by reviewing another's work without them even knowing.  So, don't be surprised if one day you get correspondence from him about your project without you even knowing he was looking at it . . . The Zen Dude's help knows no boundaries!  

Here is the Zen Dude's response:

Hello Mr. T!

I know this wasn't requested by you, but I'm working with your Survey department and was asked by them to do a cursory review of your surface work to date since they will be using it for construction staking.

So, I took a few minutes this morning and was checking out one of the project DTMs and wanted to give you a couple tips.

1)  Sometimes in very flat areas it's hard to see features with slightly inappropriate elevations. Increase the Scale factor on the View Options to something larger when you view the Features or Triangles. This will exaggerate any issues. I do this all the time.

Make sure you remember to change the Scale back to 1; otherwise every plan view command will apply that scaling.

2)   Sometimes display just the Features. Sometimes display just the Triangles. Sometimes display both. It all depends on the complexity and amount of data. This will help reveal any of those minor errors that will sometimes go unnoticed.

3)   You have to get good at rotating the view in MicroStation to do this. Practice this all the time. If you get really good it impresses people ; )

4)   Check on top and underneath for feature anomalies.

5)   Change the Display Style (found in the View Attributes dialog box) to get a cleaner perspective. Sometimes it helps make issues pop. I use Smooth Shadows but sometimes the others are good. Try them out ... depending on the version of MicroStation you are on you may or may not see all of these. There are some really cool ones.

6)   Adjust the brightness to help see things better. Monitors are very different and this can be helpful at times. 

7)   And lastly (for now ; ) . . . whenever you think your surface is pretty clean, or want to get a gauge of the potential unresolved issues, go to the Resolve Crossing Segments command.

8)   I don't recommend ever using this to actually 'resolve' any problems, but it's awesome to locate them. I described this command in detail last year in my Zen Illuminations DTM tip series. But here it is in a nutshell:

a.   Set your Surface at the top.

b.   Set the Mode to Interactive (Don't use Automatic)

c.   Set the Delta Tolerance to 0.00

d.   Toggle the greater than (>) less than (<) sign and switch it to greater than (>)

 i.  This will look for all problems greater than 0.00

e.   Click Apply and the list window at the bottom will show you any potential issues and theirElevation Delta

f.   Make sure you set your view back to Top and Wireframe (if you had shading on).

g.   Click on any item in the list window and it will drive the screen to center on that issue

h.   Analyze that conflict and figure out what's wrong.

 9)   Do these checks every now and then just to make sure your model is clean as you work.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Civilly yours,  

-zen