Page Contents

Introduction

This page demonstrates hoe to configure WinCan VX and WinCan Map for the best results while making 3D Measurements.

Paying attention to these items will prevent many frustrations during operations. In this description, we will only consider settings that are required to make 3D Measurement successful.

It should be remembered that WinCan Vx is a global solution that works in nearly 300 different inspection standards around the world and many different languages and territories, and they are all different, so there is seldom a one-size-fits-all solution for user settings. Hence why these need to be set by the user.

WinCan VX User Settings are saved, so they only need to be set once, but they must be reset after a clean software installation, or recovered from the backup settings.

WinCan VX makes a backup of the user data on the first launch each day, which is why it takes slightly longer to start up each morning. Where a new installation is made, these settings can be retrieved from the option in Tools → Backup → Restore → Restore from file.

WinCan VX User Settings

The WinCan VX User Settings are accessed from the Home → Settings menu option.

Don’t auto create laterals

By default, this setting is on, it should be turned off for this workflow.

Turning it off saves time at the end of a TV inspection because VX will prompt the user to create the laterals after the inspection closing (or abandoned) code is entered and all they need to do is click the green tick to complete the process.

This saves the need to explicitly click the Auto Create Laterals button in the Tools ribbon.

Section/Lateral Auto-naming

In many inspection standards in WinCan VX, the auto naming (how the asset ID of the section or lateral is constructed) is defined by the standard and is set in the template in VX. In these cases, the user cannot change the naming pattern and it does not matter what is set here.

However, for some standards (including many in the German speaking market), the standard is not set in the template, even though it is defined in the standard. This is because some users decide to do it a different way at the request of their customers.

So, it is critically important that it is now defined here. The pattern defined in the Isybau standard is ‘Upstream Node’ so the section/lateral ID is the same as the upstream node ID.

Further down, we have the system default naming pattern which by default is ‘Date and time stamp’. This is not needed if the main naming pattern is set, but if the user wishes to not set a default naming pattern, then they should reset this option to ‘8 character random string’ to avoid problems where multiple laterals created by the auto-create lateral tool have the same ID when they are created by the computer all in the same second.

3D Measurement

Here, we must select the correct measurement device and hit the green tick to confirm.

For some devices, it is also necessary to click the ‘Select start direction’ checkbox, but not for all and not for iPek.

Auto Create Connections Plugin

It is important to set these controls so that when the laterals are auto created, the nodes have the correct naming patterns for the selected inspection standard.

1. The naming pattern - set as required. For German standards, there are 2 options:

   1. DEU Isybau - Inspektionsrichtung - numbers the connection points and lateral upstream nodes numerically along the length of the inspection from the beginning, starting at 1.

   2. DEU Isybau - Fliessrichtung - similar to a, but always in a downstream direction, regardless of the way that the inspection was carried out by the operator.

2. For the Isybau standard, this must be set to ‘Use connection type’. For all other standards, use the default option ‘Use node type’.

3. Set the default inspection direction for system created laterals. For 3D measurement, this will usually be upstream, but there are other workflows that also use this tool, where it would be normal to set it to downstream.

4. if the coordinates of both of the nodes connected to the lateral are known, then we can automatically assign their geometric length in either full 3D or XY plane only 2D. Full 3D works very well when you have excellent 3D geometric data, but it can also cause problems when the data is not so good, maybe where some nodes have good Z values and some have it not defined. Using the 2D length is a safer option, but maybe slightly less accurate. The 3D option will give more accurate results, but will give really wild results where the data is bad.

View Profile

In order to display the 3D Wizard for this workflow, we must set the VX main window view theme:

Once it is set, it will be remembered.

If the 3D Measurement panel is not visible, it can usually be reactivated by clicking on the ‘Show Hidden Windows’ button in the Views ribbon bar like this:

WinCan VX Project Tips

Setting the Coordinate System

When a new WinCan project is created, user can set the required coordinate system here before the first time WinCan Map is opened for the current project:

The list of coordinate systems available here is filtered to the country of the current project, so this works for all countries that have coordinate systems defined in the background file. This file can easily be updated with new coordinate systems if required.

Setting it here will mean it does not need to be set when you launch Map for the first time with this project.

See also in this image that the project auto naming is set for this project. If it says ‘None’ here, then we can expect there to be some problems with the data and this should be addressed.

WinCan Map User Settings

General Settings

Similar to WinCan VX, Map is also a global solution, so again there is no one set of settings that works for everyone. To ensure good results in 3D Measurement projects, please pay attention to these settings in File → Settings options:

1. It is possible here to set a default coordinate system when Map is launched. This is a good idea as it often saves problems in the future. The option should usually set to the same projection system as defined in WinCan VX.

2. This option displays the 3D Measurement layer in WinCan Map, but will be removed at some point in the future since the layer will automatically be shown when user has the 3D feature enabled on their WinCan license.

Node Templates

The node templates defines the data that is sent into the VX project when a node is created and plotted in Map. The default option here is like the current UK inspection standard, simply because the UK market was the first to use this feature maybe 7 years ago.

User can do several things here to suit their chosen inspection standard.

First option is to simply change the Template to a new option from the drop down list, like this:

With this setting, the Isybau Schacht node template will be loaded when the user plots a manhole.

An alternative, more advanced solution is to define several templates here and give your own Captions to Display, maybe like this:

With these settings, when a user plots a manhole, they will now see this pop-up before they get to the node template and after they click an option, the correct template will be loaded for the next step, so they can select which one they wish to use today:

Note - the node templates can be easily and quickly modified by the WinCan Support teams if needed.

Load Measurement Themes

This feature will be loaded automatically in a future update. To make it manually now:

Also, there is a more user friendly ‘Theme for All’ for the other non-measurement layers:

WinCan Map Tips

Unplotted Assets

A key and important part of working with GIS data is that it is only a collection of point, line or polygon objects that have data attributes attached. Objects that do not have any coordinates cannot be displayed in WinCan Map.

The Draw button in WinCan Map will display an alphabetical list of manholes and nodes that exist in the WinCan VX project but do not have coordinates:

This can be very useful when plotting the coordinates of a node for the first time, because you can highlight select the manhole that you would like to plot, and then when you use the ‘Draw Point’ tool in the Edit ribbon, the correct manhole ID will be entered into the node template without any typing mistakes.

Installing the 3D Measurement Ribbon

This is a temporary solution only until this ribbon is installed into the system.

Save this file and unzip it to a safe folder location of your choice.

Now, make aright click on the Map ribbon and select the Customise Ribbon option, and then use the Import button to navigate to one of the files that you have extracted and saved, and click Ok to finish:

This will install the 3D Measurement ribbon which includes all of the most useful tools from Map for this workstream:

Styling Themes

It should be remembered that GIS data (which is what we are working with here in 3D Measurements) is simply a collection of points, lines or polygons that have attribute data attached and the data itself does not have any particular styling.

This is contrast to CAD data where the lines and objects are heavily styled with colours and fills etc to make the drawing pleasing to the eye and easy to understand. CAD files focus more on styling and GIS data focusses completely on the object data. This is the key difference between the two types of application, and WinCan Map is a GIS application, not a CAD application.

But, we can apply styling themes to layers in Map in any way that we wish and the options are very powerful, but they will not be covered here. This is something for Expert user training in WinCan Map.

There are some predefined styles included in WinCan Map and the default style for Isybau projects is commonly used across the market, but it is not the most user-friendly theme when working with 3D Measurements

The recommended pre-defined Map styling theme for Isybau projects is ‘Isybau 3D Measurement’ and this can be set by the operator with a right-click on any layer in the layers panel and select the ‘Load Themes for All’ option, and then select the ‘Isybau 3D Measurement’ option and green tick to close:

This theme will be included in all WinCan VX builds from 6th July 2023.

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