FOR CIVIL & SURVEY ENGINEERS

For Civil and Survey Engineers: Earthworks on Real Terrain

Outside mining the questions are the same shape and different in detail: how much do we move to reach this level, will the road fit the ground, where does the water go, and what goes in the bill of quantities. All of it comes off the surface, and all of it has to leave as a drawing someone else can open.

Bringing a level platform to a sloping site

Draw the area, set the design level and STREAM builds the slope that ties it into the existing ground, computing where the design daylights against the real surface rather than against an assumed plane.

A balance curve plots volume against platform elevation, cut on one side and fill on the other, so the level where the two balance is read off instead of iterated towards. Slopes are entered in degrees or as 1:x, and the checks flag a batter past your limit or a design that never meets the ground.

A corridor that sits on the ground you surveyed

Place PI vertices on the terrain, set curves by radius, add clothoid transitions, then build the vertical profile from PVI points, grades and vertical curves against a ground line taken straight from the DEM.

Define carriageway width, shoulders and batter slopes, apply superelevation by edge or axis rotation, and get the section at every station with its cut and fill areas, a quantity table and a mass haul view. Standards checking lists violations of maximum grade, minimum radius and sight distance with the station where they occur.

Quantities for the bill

Station-based cubature gives cross-section areas and volumes along the alignment, with DXF section drawings for the drawing set. Cut and fill against a reference surface or level covers the site earthwork.

Cross-sections are taken at the interval you choose, but the surfaces are built at the full resolution of the terrain — volumes follow the real ground rather than the section spacing.

Drainage and what the site does with water

Hydrology traces flow paths and shows where water accumulates, which is the quick answer to whether a proposed platform creates a pond and where an outfall has to go.

Slope and aspect colour the terrain by gradient and orientation; viewshed answers what is visible from a point, which is usually what a screening or a sight-line argument comes down to.

Handover in the formats the project already uses

Alignments, contours, sections and measured geometry export to DXF; quantity tables to CSV or Excel; surfaces and analysis rasters to GeoTIFF with their georeferencing; the site to KMZ.

Coordinate systems are read from the files and confirmed before a layer joins the project, and assigning a CRS is kept separate from transforming one — the distinction that quietly ruins a project when it is missed.

Frequently asked questions

Is STREAM a replacement for a civil design suite?

No. It covers the terrain side: surfaces, earthwork volumes, grading, corridor geometry on real ground, drainage behaviour and the quantities that come off them. Detailing, structures and documentation stay in your CAD package, which is why everything exports as DXF.

How accurate are the volumes?

They are computed on the full-resolution surface rather than on the section spacing, so accuracy is governed by the survey rather than by the software's sampling. Cross-sections are a reporting interval, not the basis of the calculation.

Can I work with a survey in a local coordinate system?

Yes. The CRS is read from the file where it exists and can be assigned where it does not. Assigning is kept distinct from transforming, so a local grid is not silently reprojected.

What formats can I bring in?

GeoTIFF elevation rasters and orthophotos, ESRI ASCII grids, LAS/LAZ point clouds and DXF drawings.

Does it handle sites larger than my machine's memory?

Yes. Surfaces are streamed out of core, so only the area in view is held at full detail and a survey larger than available memory still pans and zooms at full resolution.

Take your next site off the survey and into quantities

Free beta for Windows x64. Works fully offline with GeoTIFF, LAS/LAZ and DXF.

Download STREAM free