Creating a Map of a Pit Design

Overview

In this section you will create the map of the Pit Design and natural surface. The map will show the pit crests
and toes, in different line styles, as well as labelled topography contours outside the pit.

What You'll Learn

Now that the design is complete one of the next steps is to produce a plot. In this section you will create the
map shown below as well as giving a broad overview of the following functions:
This manual is intended to focus on the Pit Design tools, rather than Plotting. All user inputs required to
create this plot will be shown, however detailed explanations will not be given. A general introduction to
plotting is contained in the Principles of Surpac Vision Applications Manual.
 Merging and preparing data
 Creating additional entities
 Creating a map definition
 Processing and reviewing the plot

Objective

Before plotting the pit and topography you will merge the pit design and the topography into one string file.

Because of the technique used for the pit design, whereby the pit was designed up to the topography and not
above it, the pit design is ready to plot without further modification. However, the topography contours
presently exist over top of the pit design, and must be 'clipped' with the uppermost crest in order that only
the topography contours outside of the pit may be plotted.

The first step is to extract the topography contours outside of the pit. The Apply Boundary function is used
for this.

1. Reset graphics to clear any data from the screen then choose File tools  Apply boundary string.
Enter the parameters as shown below. Please note that your crest string may be different so check it
and use the one that is applicable

Before we append these files into a single Graphics layer to create one file containing the pit and
topography, we must be conscious of the string numbers which the resulting file will contain. If the
data is merged into one file, then the string numbers must be different for data that we wish to plot
differently. We will want to plot the contours differently to the pit design, but presently they both
have string numbers incrementing from 1.

Contour data is much easier to manage if the string numbers are related to or, if the data allows, are equal to
the contour values. Because our topography contours are integer values and between 1 and 32,000, we are
able to assign the string numbers the contour values (string numbers are limited to the range 1 to 32,000).
This will make it much easier to manage this data within the string file, especially when wishing to plot the
contours, and the index contours with a different line style.

2. Let us start by running a string file summary to check what the range of Z values are. From the
main menu choose File tools  String summary:
3. View the temp_topo1.not file. You will see that the string numbers range from 1 to 20 and
elevations from 990 to 1085 in 5 metre intervals. Open the file TEMP_TOPO1.STR into GRAPHICS.
Under the edit menu select STRING RENUMBER RANGE. Complete the form as follows:

The `string range from' and `string range to' fields in the above form need to each constitute the same
number of values, so they can be matched. Otherwise the form will ask you to correct the entries.

4. Save the file to TEMP_TOPO1.STR.

Plotting

Objective.

You are now ready to set up the plot entities and map.
1. Choose the File  Open  plotting window , then Entity New.
2. Entity Name: crest
Entity name: toe
Entity name: contour with labels
3. Immediately below the Text Angle field in the string operation, ensure that Text Angle Type is set
to RELATIVE, so that the contour labels are plotted parallel to the contours. In addition to the one
string operation, the entity should also contain a line operation specifying a solid line (as in the crest
entity).
Next we will create a Map Definition.

4. Choose the Map New function and create the following map definition:
5. After the map definition has been created, choose the Process Map function. Complete the PLOT
PRESENTATION PARAMETERS form as shown below:
6. Enter suitable title lines for the title block and choose Apply.

7. Set the lower left corner of the map at the coordinates shown below:

8. Choose a grid interval of 100 and a grid type of 'border ticks', to create ticks at the edge of the page.

9. Open the plot file into Plot Preview. It should resemble the following image:
 This completes the plotting exercise.

Review

Plotting in Surpac is very flexible, once the required entities and maps are set up, Surpac provides a very
efficient and powerful plotting tool.

If you are unclear on any of the above information you may want to review this section before continuing.

Where To Next

We'll now move to a short exercise in Dump design using the same tools that were used to design the pit.