Solutions – Curvefitting Contours

The USGS had a BIG problem – 60 megabytes

They needed to perform hydraulic analysis on a region represented by a 60 MB contour file and every time they tried, the analysis software became overwhelmed. They were getting no results.

Luckily, the analysis software vendor (Boss International) was familiar with this problem and sold the USGS a copy of Curvefit. Boss knows that when a contour file is processed by Curvefit, the file size is dramatically reduced but the information content is not. The USGS Curvefitted that 60 meg. file down to a respectable size of only 17 megabytes, which was then easily analyzed

Federal employees are prohibited from endorsing products, so we can’t publish the name of this customer who works for the USGS. But these are his words:

“We are grateful for your program. In some cases, Curvefit has allowed us to do work that we may not have been able to do with the larger files. In other words instead of using 5 foot contour intervals we probably would have had to go to 10 foot contour intervals. And another thing, the processing time on the smaller files substantially reduced analysis time which directly resulted in lower labor costs on the project.”

Optimizing highly generalized contours

NURBS fit first and then use Curvefit with a large setting for precision.

Watch it Work
Optimizing Large contour maps
Watch it Work