Road flattening in Terrains

[CesarPiovanetti]

All,

im in the process of creating flat roads on a terrain surface. i interpolated the roads elevation using the road centerline, then want to buffer the interpolated line in order to enforce the elevation of the centerline on the edge of pavement. When the line is buffered, the Z values are all changed to 0.

any thoughts, scripts, workflows, will be appreciated.

thanks for having me out!

[JakubSisak]

Likely not possible with an out-of-the box tool.  TIN is more flexible (rather than Terrain Dataset) when it comes to editing, manupulating the surface and geoprocessing so i would recommended to use TIN. You could then clip out the road area from the original TIN then use the TIN Editing Toolbar to 'flatten' the road area manually. Unfortunately this would have to be done on node-to-node basis. You could also create points or point groups along the buffered centreline then manually assign elevation values to the points then create a new TIN or incorporate the new nodes/breaklines into the existing surface.

Alternatively you can design the road in a 3rd party application such as Google SketchUp 8 or AutoCAD Civil 3D the import the model into ArcGIS. Google SketchUp models can be imported as multipatch. See this blog post:
http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2010/10/arcgis-10-and-sketchup-8.html#links

Civil 3D is the tools for designing roads although exporting the models is not as seamless but, it is possible. Attached is an example of a haul road designed in Civil 3D exported as XML, converted to XYZ and reconstructed in ArcGIS as a TIN Surface then overlaid over the source LiDAR data.