[Therion] Drawing the map of a vertical cave

[Benedikt Hallinger]

Two things come to my mind:

1. I also often use aven to assist my drawing. What helps me alot here is linux/kde, because I can do stuff in aven, put the window below xtherions and make the xtherion window  transparent. Aven works as a kind of „background image“ in that regard.

2. when drawing vertically, isn‘t drawing (and rendering)  exendet elevations far more useful and expressive?
You also can export xvis in that projection.


> Am 28.01.2025 um 17:17 schrieb Tarquin Wilton-Jones via Therion <therion at speleo.sk>:
> 
> Hi Jean-Florent,
> 
>> I am drawing the map of a cave that is so far mostly vertical. In the map editor of xtherion is very hard to distinguish which lines / stations of the xvi belong to which part of the cave, because they are all drawn over each other when seen from above. When adding walls and objects it becomes even worse.
> 
> 
> In general, I can say "me too". We had this exact same issue. We kept our surveys short, so there were not too many stations overlapping. This was also important when gathering the data, though SexyTopo is actually very helpful there, and highlights the "current station" and its splays (this feature was added specifically because of our needs while surveying). I would dearly love something similar in XTherion...
> 
> This is part of our survey, where 10 passages overlap, within a vertical range of just 62 metres;
> https://www.cavinguk.co.uk/pwlldwfn/pwlldwfnarticle/normal/Chaos.png
> XTherion shows this as a grey jumbled mass of nonsense. Shorter surveys really, really helps to keep the noise down. However, it is often hard to find a convenient place to end a survey in a really vertical cave, and you end up giving yourself a load of ugly "join" commands to make up for it.
> 
> In these situations, XTherion seems to expect you to have drawn perfect lines in the cave, so you don't have to rely on the splays.
> 
>> Is there an easy way to deal with this? Maybe generating different xvi's for the different levels in the cave and drawing the scraps in different th2 files?
> 
> 
> I don't worry about the drawn scraps, since they feel unimportant when not focused. I worry more about "which splay am I trying to touch with this line". We used Survex Aven to render the .3d output, click to focus a splay end, and repeatedly flick from plan (P) to elevation (E) to see the splays move, and work out which one ended up where in the plan view, then try to locate that same splay in XTherion. It was very helpful being able to have the two apps running on two screens at the same time, to compare them. Aven makes things a lot more easy to see. Loch does not have any useful splay focusing or keyboard shortcuts to help with that.
> 
> As for your proposal; sure, you can do that. Move the subset of the data into its own survey, create a .thconfig, select it, export an XVI. Use that in a .th2. But then you need to import your sketches and overlay them somehow to make it useful. And I don't know how to do that part. Maybe someone else here does?
> 
> I also note that exported XVIs use a much lower natural resolution than our surveying app's export. I think it might be possible to change that in the properties of the embedding command in the .th2, but again, I don't know how to do that.
> 
> Was that any better of an answer than shrugging my shoulders?
> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tarquin
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