Polygon issues
mike robel
🖼️ 15 images Surveyor
I constantly have an issue with polygons. I will be moving along very smoothly and unhurried, and I click on a point and I can "feel" the program pause, then you see the Window's 10 circle thing showing you the program is thinking, and then POOF the program crashes and closes as slick as a whistle.
This happens to me all the time. The current map has relatively few contour lines and is very small as compared to say my covering force map and my large Little Bighorn map which are each 5 feet x 5 feet and must have hundreds of meters of contour lines in many different intervals.
This map is merely a small portion of the little bighorn map, 22" x 34" with contours ranging from 3000 feet to 3700 feet at 100 foot intervals. I have relatively few contour lines drawn.
What is the deal that it does this?
In the attached FCW, you will see the upper 3300 contour outlined in black with a vertical line going up the center of the map. The thing crashed three times, so I decided to split it in two. I was working on the 3400 contour and purposely did several sections as separate polygons on the the lower and right edges which you can see as the darker green. The lighter green is the lower portion of the 3300 contour.
I have made much longer contours than this for other maps.
I have taken actions such as:
*Saving the file, exiting, and reopening the program.
*Exiting all other applications (Internet, music, calculator, photo-editor, etc.) so CC3+ is the only running application .
*After a crash, closing everything and restarting the computer and just running CC3+.
*Gracefully shutting down the computer and restarting it, then just running CC3+.
I have tried reinstalling in the past, but I haven't done it yet.
If you wish to try to duplicate it, find the left hand blue line just off the map. This marks the start of the 3300 foot contour. Start there and follow the contour. You must navigate to the upper right (near, but not connecting to the green patch in the upper righthand corner), then use "c" for a corner and click on the top of the map, then navigate to the upper left hand corner, use "c" again, navigate down to the start point, use "c" again, click, and then right click to complete the contour.
It fails when I try it with the .0000 thickness as well as a .015 thickness.
Again, I have done much larger maps without this number of crashes. I perhaps tend to make points close together, but I am merely following the contour lines and they don't look right if they are too "smooth".
You can see other large maps I have drawn here:
The map and the PNG/BMP map are in the same directory.
Thoughts, comments, solutions?
The FCW is attached.
Thanks for any pointers.
Comments
I can tell that you like the look of smoothed curves. However, the smoothing generates eight times as many nodes as you have entered every time an operation like drawing or editing happens. If you can use regular unsmoothed polygons instead of smoothed ones, it might make things less prone to error.
How are you drawing the polygons? That is, what tool are you using when you get the crash?
I'm just using the smooth polygon tool. The problem seems more prevalent for this small map than it was for the big map. I was endeavoring to not click so often, but I guess I can try to use the regular polygon tool, which will require more clicking, but won't generate all the extra nodees.
Non-smoothed polygons also draw faster than smoothed ones, so they can support higher node counts without slowdown.
The freehand drawing tool may be of interest to you if you've never tried it.
Well, I tried the straight-polygon and it seemed to me to be much slower than the smooth polygon and I got frustrated and stopped.
I next tried the smooth path tool and got about was about 6 inches away from getting to the origin point when it blew up. My intention was to convert it to a polygon.
I guess next I could try using the straight-line tool to draw the whole contour or connect two smaller smooth paths? (what is the difference between line and path?)
As far as the free-hand tool, I failed lines, coloring, and penmanship in kindergarten and cannot trace the contour line very accurately. perhaps I would do better with a horizontal monitor that supported a pen.
Clearly the nodes are the thing. The two 3200-foot polygons I drew each had about 1781 nodes when I checked them using list, so that would be about 3500 nodes or maybe 24-28000 after you multiply by 8?
What is the max number of nodes? I thought it was mentioned in a thread and in the CC3+ Users manual I couldn't find it by searching.
I went back to my large Little Bighorn map and checked number of nodes, as you can see I had contours that exceeded the 1780 amount in that map. Why would I be able to have a large number of lodes on the bigger map and be dying at 1700 nodes on a smaller map?
3200-foot = 2097
3300-foot = 4147
3400-foot = 2337
3500-foot = 4467
3600foot = 4241
3700-foot = 3667
3800-foot = 1443
I guess its time for a nap.
I suspect (but can't prove) that some geometries cause problems with the internal B-spline generation. If you get a couple of nodes in just the wrong spot, it might cause numerical and/or memory issues that would result in a crash. When I tried to load the map above on the standard CC3+ distribution that I have installed, it causes one of those silent crashes. I can load it on my development software version, but I haven't been able to crash it there yet.
The limit on the number of nodes in an entity is more of a Windows limit than a CC3 one, but it's historically been set at around 23000 nodes per entity (the precise number that causes problems has varied with OS version and video driver version, but 23000 seems to be a safe lower bound). I'm surprised that you were able to get 4467 nodes to work on a smooth polygon; it should have either discarded data or failed in an ugly manner.
It's really too bad that the old BLACKART program isn't still around: it was a nice piece of software designed for digitizing contour maps.
What's the source material that you're using for your maps? The image reference in your drawing was to an image on your hard drive and I'm not sure what it would look like.
The base image is a 1:24000 USGS map that I downloaded as a pdf and converted to a PNG.
Intersting that you have two different installations. I just use the normal download. I can upload the PNG if you like.
I am curious to see the PNG you're working from, yes.
You can look at the JPG here. The PNG is too large to load into the gallery. Perhaps its size is the problem? I usually use a JPG or a BMP, but my artsy-fartsy daughters tell me PNG have less image degradation over time even just saving or closing the same file.
https://forum.profantasy.com/uploads/422/YXI6VUIYVHAD.jpg
I use Irfanview to reduce the size of graphics. In the forums I post 900 pixel width, and in my gallery they are a max of 2000 pixels.