Episode 27: Hidden Secrets of RAS Mapper

[Music] welcome to fall momentum and HC Raz podcast I am your host Ben KY and joining me today Chris cadell Chris it's episode 27 but it kind of feels like episode one because it's been a very very very long time since you and I had a chance to to connect on this forum so how have you been yeah it has been a very long time and um a lot has gone on and in the span of about not quite a year since our last podcast um but yeah lots has has transpired in this last year-ish time frame between both of us right things are really good for me one of the biggest um news items for me as I moved from Portland to Corvalis and for those of you not familiar with the Oregon area Corvalis is um about an hour and a half Drive south of Portland without commuting congestion and um also the home of my Oregon State Beavers so I've been going to a lot of go beavs I've been going to a lot of sporting events I went to every home football game this year and um looking forward to baseball starting up I'll probably go to some basketball games here in a little bit um how about you Ben what's new for you I know you've got a lot to talk about Ben yeah yeah 2023 was a crazy year which is part of the reason why we did not make very many appearances on on this forum uh last year so my wife and I uh were fortunate enough to welcome our first baby into the family in May of last year so uh between the approach of that event and then obviously the The Fallout it was a very busy year also was super super fortunate between uh our employer clenet and um the state of Washington to have some pretty amazing parental leave benefits too and so I was off work for um a number of months focusing on family and and kiddo which was which was awesome um but as of January 2nd uh my wife and I are both back to work full-time which means that I have a lot more time to talk about all the cool things that are happening in the HC R software so it was a fun year but I'm ready to to get down and dirty again well we miss we missed you Ben a lot not just having you around but uh what you bring to the to the office so uh it's great to have you back and um I know though you didn't totally disconnect from Raz and you're probably teaching the little guy a little bit about Ras mapper and uh you know how to draw D the areas and stuff and uh he'll be the next generation of um high-powered Ras modelers for sure so um how about the uh the weather though we've had lately and and for those of you who don't know Ben is like in a wind tunnel where he lives basically so you got up the brunt to that that we were to record a number of weeks ago and uh there was a huge winter storm that came through uh massive winds we got down to negative4 degree wind chill up here on top of the hill in cus andh yeah a lot of a lot of craziness and then of course it's totally flipped and now we got 60 degree weather it's it's great feels like spring so um I don't know climate change is real I'm telling you and the the atmospheric Rivers the Pineapple Express that we get here it feels like we we've had more this winter than any other winter that I can remember in fact I think we just had two of them back to back go through uh I think Cal Northern California got it worse than we did but still we had some Rivers up really high and you know you and I as hydraulic Engineers River Engineers uh it's always fun to get out and see um Rivers when they're up high because things look a lot different and a lot of times what we're doing with acrz is we're modeling flood events or High Water Events and so anytime you can get out there and see things um happening that you don't normally get to see it it gives you New Perspective on how water moves around structures and things like that so yeah with the wild weather brings some you know opportunities to learn a little bit more for us yeah I love that so we got some uh really exciting technical stuff to talk about today Chris um but before we got get there I did want to take a step back um because because like we mentioned even though it is episode 27 it feels like episode one in a lot of ways and we thought this kind of restart of the vodcast would be a great time to reflect on how we got here um and and then also give listeners a kind of a peek behind the curtain about what's coming this year for the podcast and and moving forward it's really interesting I was on LinkedIn the other day and saw three or four different technical engineering focused podcasts that had ads on LinkedIn that were that were being advertised um the Army Corp of Engineers has a new uh podcast which is which is really cool but uh I it is cool to think that um we were certainly not the first technical engineering podcast out there but I do feel like between when we started this in 2020 and now you know the area of kind of podcasting around your professional Career and Technical topics has really exploded and so it's it's cool to see that we were part of kind of that initial wave of of content creators around the engineering world and that's just been cool to see and I'm excited to see um you know what other things people come up with to to talk about on on a podcast Forum yeah it's been it's been really inspiring to see that and um is kind of encouraging Ben and I to uh up our game a little bit and do this more regularly and uh provide a little bit more professionalism to the proceedings here right yeah yeah exactly so as we look forward to 2024 um Chris and I are going to try to do this more regularly I know in the past it's been a little bit sporadic um we have some great content up there which people continue to enjoy which is awesome but we would like to have a little bit more consistency and part of the reason for that is we'd like to kind of shift gears from solely talking about individual Raz topics to having a little bit more interaction with those who follow the podcast follow us on LinkedIn um and so we are going to start the process of soliciting uh questions from folks that that follow the vodcast um that you know maybe we can answer on on this forum as well as interacting and asking some questions of of you all because the reality is is there's a lot of users out there that know a lot about Raz or have different experiences with different Raz features that we don't have and so if there's a way that we can kind of farm those out from others and then share that with the larger audience here we'd like to start doing that as well so uh in in 24 definitely follow both Chris and I as well as Klein on LinkedIn there'll be a lot more engagement opportunities for uh hecr users and we're excited to see kind of how that changes the dynamic of the show yeah and I think we would be remiss in not uh mentioning our um invisible partner in crime Jill who um is going to be doing a lot of stuff in the background for us she's our marketing Ace here at Klein Schmidt we we just have an amazing marketing team in general but uh Jill's going to be helping us out and she's got an expertise in digital content creation so uh this is going to be super helpful and awesome to have her much more involved with us going forward yep great so in the spirit of that uh again keep an eye out the goal is to publish these vodcasts the third Thursday of every month so that's going to be kind of our Target date so keep an eye out for the releases around those days and uh to kick off our kind of desire to to interact more with listeners we have a couple questions that we'd love for you all to respond either comment on the video on the LinkedIn page or on the YouTube page with whichever you are more connected with so the questions are is who are you how did you learn about full momentum uh how long have you been using Raz and what do you like about the show um we'd also be interested in you know what if you had control over the show and the topics that we discussed or the or the kind of layout of the show what would you do do you have any ideas that we can utilize to potentially improve the show we'd love to get that sort of feedback to understand our listener base a little bit and uh again hopefully customize the show and make it a little bit more professional anything else to add Chris no I think you hit all the high points um just looking forward to this this going to be a lot of fun sweet well uh before we dive into a few more announcements and then our technical topic for today I did want to just uh give a quick shout out and thanks to our sponsor um we're thankful to be sponsored by our engineering firm kleid Associates who is known throughout the industry as a firm that provides practical solutions to complex problems affecting energy water and the environment you can learn more at kmat group.com would encourage you guys to go check out the website also some really cool um announcements that will be posted on that website uh coming out here shortly mostly tied to training opportunities around HC as so we have a number of training opportunities that we're going to be putting on this year we're actually in the midst of doing a training as we speak um that's going to be that's kind of our our winter 2024 course so that's a six week online course 1D 2D we also just um finalized an in-person class which we're GNA H hold in Atlanta Georgia on September 10th 11th and 12th so that'll be a 3-day more traditional immersive 1D 2D class the location for that TBD but it's going to be in Atlanta more details to come on that and then if you can't make it to Atlanta but you still want to take training course through us uh the next online opportunity is going to be um from October 9th through November 13th and that's going to be again that six week course where we have four hour lecture lecture sessions every Wednesday with workshops in between so some really cool opportunities coming up Chris for people to continue to learn more about 1D 2D Ras modeling yeah you guys should check it out out it's we have a lot of fun with these classes um it's really interactive there's a lot of back and forth it's not just Ben and me um lecturing at everybody it's uh I mean there's some of that of course we got to get the content out but um it is a lot of interaction and a lot of Q&A going on and um yeah it's a good time we have a really good time in uh you know occasionally we have some giveaways too some uh fabulous prizes I also want to mention too for uh the new beginners out there to hecz brand new to hecz if you're looking for an introductory course uh I have a regular offering that I give through the University of Wisconsin so if you just go to their website um just Google University of Wisconsin professional education and then search on hecr you'll find it we do two online per year and one inperson uh the next inperson is in July and the next online we've got one it's U by the time this podcast comes out it's already started but um the next uh online will be in the fall so um check that out if you are a new beginner to RZ awesome and then a few other things um aside from the training opportunities that are going to be offered Chris and I are going to be at some conferences coming up here in the near future and so we wanted to let everybody know who may be at the conference to come say hi uh so Chris along with a few of other co-workers from clench are going to be at ussd in attle um from April 22nd to the 26th Chris anything in particular to share about ussd and what you're going to be doing there so we'll have an exhibit there it's um always a good conference I think I like to go every year um as you know those of you know ussd is United States Society on dams so it's all about dams and in particular we go there for looking at uh when presenting on ways that you can use HEC R around dams whether it's a dam break study or doing some Reservoir operations um you know any or all the above um and it's always fun to see uh colleagues there that sometimes I just see once a year but um come on by say hi I know our buddies Eric and Pria from East Bay mud are going to be there so that'll be fun to see them um so yeah come by and say hi awesome and then uh myself will be at ASF the as asfn National Conference in Salt Lake City um that's going to be from June 23rd to June June 27th um and I will be presenting there with a cooworker uh on a project that we've been working on really since I came over to clench in 2019 sylv River Basin project uh it's a really cool project that involves some pretty cool Ras modeling as well so if you have a chance to attend the conference uh check out the session while I'll be presenting and come by and say hi I'd love to meet some folks in person we we won't be hosting the podcast live at ASN pm this year we had a great experience of that a couple years ago um but maybe in upcoming years we'll do something similar to that yeah sweet shall shall we jump into the technical topic for today Chris I got a trivia question for you first though okay I'm gonna see if I can stump you you probably will don't feel bad because this is a this is a very new feature in Raz that not a whole lot of people know about or even understand but I want to ask you it's a two-park trivia question what does liia stand for as in the equation solver liia or the equation set for 2D modeling and why would you use it I can't I'm I'm I'm so tempted to pull up the computational settings right now but that would be cheap uh does that is the I something to do with like inertia yep you got it um limited inertia application that's my guess very close very close I mean it that kind of actually that kind of actually Rings true that I mean that could actually work as the name okay um very I look at as very limited application but um it it stands for local inertia approximation okay and so this is this is kind of like if you think of the uh the full um Elm oian lran um momentum equation that has both uh acceleration terms included local and convective the lia keeps the um the local thus the name local and gets rid of the convective and so it's uh as as you might expect if it's getting rid of convective acceler acceleration then uh you wouldn't want to have you w want to apply it to a reach that changes a lot changes shape a lot you know the extreme example would be a canal would be perfect for Lia a canal with a you know um significant hydrograph um that's where local acceleration comes from is from your hydrographs um convective is from the shape of your reach and contraction and expansion so but it's I think I look at as kind of a stepping stone between diffusion wave and the full swe Elm or em methods so very cool oh good I almost got there I didn't completely embarrass myself it is it's a new feature I don't think a lot of people know about it yet um it's not well documented okay well let's go ahead and transition from that to our topic for today which we're calling the hidden secrets of rat Ras mapper so Ras mapper Chris I'll let you give a little bit more background on maybe the history of Ras mapper here in a second but Ras mapper is um kind of the gis interface within the Raz software which has become more and more usable more and more um insightful in terms of reviewing results and uh it's one of those pieces of the software that every single version that comes out there's there's new things to do um some of them are pretty cool and are pretty functional right now some of them look as though maybe they're getting put into place to help with future version releases and aren't necessarily helpful at the moment but regardless it's it's a really cool area right now for hydraulic modelers to get more familiar with continue to kind of try things out and and you know look at the different options and tools because like I said there's there's a lot of really helpful things and we're going to go through some of those today so you want to talk a littleit bit more about anything else related to to Ras mapper Chris yeah well Ras mapper um actually came out in a version before we had 2D uh there was a uh very limited kind of um basic version of of the RAS mapper today and that was in one of the I believe one in the one of the four point versions and um that was really just as a kind of a transition to get away from using geat which was the geospatial um way of doing things in Raz in the past and having something built in um but it wasn't really until 2D came out that Ras mapper really took off in its capability and and in fact it's it is um critical if you're doing 2D modeling you can't not use Ras mapper um because it's required for pre-processing 2D areas um what's interesting about Ras mapper is um a lot of you have recognized this that it operates a little bit differently than the geometry window although it does a lot of similar things there's a lot of crossover between the two eventually as I'm told um Ras mapper and the geometry window will kind of combine into one thing in a future version and so you won't have to bounce back and forth and everything will be done in just one GIS utility um my guess is it'll probably look much more like Ras mapper than it will look like the old geometry window but uh uh that's to be determined when that comes out in some future date but um yeah it's a little history and and future of Ras mapper but now with Ras mapper you can do all sorts of things both pre on the pre-processing side and the post-processing mapping side of things but one of the one thing that Ben and I recognize or realize when we go around teaching these classes is there are a lot of features in here a lot of hidden features that people don't know about and there's I guarantee you there are things I don't know about inside of Ras mapper right now and I almost every class I learned something new from a student who points something out and I go wow I didn't even know that was there that's super cool thus the episode today Ben and I want to share with you some of the hidden secrets we know but we also want to get your feedback you know what are your favorite hidden SE discovered in Ras mapper that maybe no one else knows about or few people know about maybe Ben and I don't know about uh think of this as kind of a crowdsourcing thing to share this kind of knowledge with all the Raz users out there so yeah what's let's let's get into it Ben what's what are some secrets that we want to reveal to folks out there yeah so before we get going I do want to just point out if you're not familiar with Ras mapper Chris and I did a vodcast episode on Ras mapper and that podcast episode's a little bit more focused on what the different menus are how to navigate kind of the basics of Ras mapper so if you're interested in that sort of a topic go back into the history of the podcast and um I believe it's episode two or three that we did that it's one of our more popular episodes and check that out but this is going to be more of a rapid fire bouncing around to all kinds of cool and hidden secrets within the software and the first one here is um one Chris that you and I use quite often and that is the update Legend with view so I'll let you kind of carry the conversation on that yeah so um Raz has a default way of setting the scaling or the legend that you see on the bottom right there for whatever you're looking at it could be a Terrain it could be a water surface elevation map a depth map and as you zoom in and out that scaling stays the same it's basically looking at your entire modeling domain and trying to bracket the maximum and minimum values but when you zoom in to one close in area that range could get much smaller and as you zoom in now now look everything's yellow so we can't really see variation here now the hillshade helps a little bit there but if you were to change to update Legend with view then as you change the view extents Raz will re-evaluate what the Min and Max values are within the view extent and update the legend accordingly so you get the most optimized version of the um um the range in your Legend as possible and so there's the the button right there that Ben's pointing at update Legend with view you check that box it's all you have to do it's really easy then come back out and now watch as you zoom in instead of just being all green and yellows now you get the full range of colors there so you can get a much better uh interpretation of the change in Terrain in this case looking at our Terrain map but um you can do this on water surface elevation and and that that's a really good one because you can imagine if you've got a really big long spatially uh spatial domain you go in and zoom into one part of your River you're not going to see any difference in color in your water surface elevation but if you check that box update Legend with view as you zoom in you're going to see the color variation yeah so we're showing right now the velocity output map and again what Chris is saying is as you zoom in you're just not getting that color differentiation yeah and for some models that have you know relatively small extents it's probably not a problem but for larger models where you can have a real variation in velocity water Sur solidation depth across your modeling domain it's really important to turn on this update Legend with View and again you can get to that by right clicking on any layer clicking on layer properties and then clicking on this update Legend view again that gives you the opportuni as you zoom in you're going to have those color ramps kind of automatically adjust gives you a real good picture of where in this case the velocity is highest um um even if you can see the scale down here the velocities aren't that high at all in this area they're only about half a meter per second but you can still figure out where kind of the centroid of of flow is and it can be really helpful for drawing additional layers pulling output value all kinds of good stuff next up we have render mode so yeah render mode and I guess I guess we got a little bit off off uh off schedule here so Chris I will also let you introduce the idea of render mode no worries so um render mode is is a way for Raz to take the computed results and make it look a little bit more realistic now just to give you some background when Raz computes a water surface elevation um in your modeling domain it computes one water surface elevation per cell So within the entire cell you only have a single water surface elevation calculated at any given time step now when you've got rather steep terrain or rather large cells you can get a stair stepping effect or even in map view you can get what I call fragmentation okay and if if you're looking at the true horizontal results but what Raz does to make it look a little bit more realistic is it applies some uh rendering techniques to give a little bit of slope to the final results so it looks more realistic and there's different ways you can do this that the actual default in the current version is the top method the sloping with cell Corners there's another second version sloping with cell corners and face centers where it gets a little bit more detailed and honestly I can't tell you the guts of how this works but the way I do it is if something looks a little bit off I'll try one of the other rendering modes to see if it looks a little bit better but a lot of times I'll come in and if if I really want to see what Raz is Computing to interpret results better to understand maybe why I'm getting an error or an instability then I'll switch to horizontal like that and that way you'll see um the the water level is the same in a given cell all the way around that cell so if you were to turn on a water surface elevation map we can really demonstrate the differences here so right now we're in horizontal mode right and if Ben moves his cursor around inside one cell you can see it doesn't change inside that cell now if you change the render mode to sloping and you move it around you'll see some changes you can see the numbers are changing a little bit within the cell now there's not a whole lot of change here it's pretty slow moving water but you would see it definitely see it back in the river um where you've got a a pretty good gradient going down now I know there's a lot of people listening right now going hey this isn't a hidden secret I know about render mode and I know it's this one is kind of welln but there are some people who still get surprised by this and maybe don't understand what the differences in in rendering modes are so we we wanted to bring this one out even though it's not I wouldn't consider this necessarily a hidden secret but maybe not as welln as it should be yeah good all right the next hidden secret which I'm going to drive is around a newer feature which is the ability to plant plot a contour of a particular map based on where your cursor is at and this is usable and I think um helpful for looking at terrain Maps as well as depth maps and velocity Maps potentially so let me show you an example here so if you have a Terrain um and maybe you're trying to you can see that this portion of the terrain is a little bit elevated maybe you're trying to get an idea of generally um kind of what Contour is assoc assciated with a particular elevation on this Terrain map what you can do is right click on that terrain layer go into image display properties which is where our update Legend with view is also at and you can turn on this plot Contour at cursor which is an additional option so if you turn that on go ahead and minimize this a little bit what you're going to see is that as I drag my mouse around the map it's going to Contour to the value that is associated with this elevation in this case so right now my cursor is highlighted over elevation 284.8 4.22 Contour exists and this is pretty cool um again to kind of just help diagnose similar areas of elevation you can do something similar in the channel if you wanted to see you know which portions of your channel are below a certain threshold you see kind of the deepest parts of the channel and then obviously As you move up stream that Contour is going to extend upwards in the same light you can do something very similar with the velocity map so I'm going to come on uh to the velocity I'm going to zoom into our little restoration site here which is one of our workshops that Chris and I use and if you right click again on layer properties turn on that Contour at cursor you're going to be able to hover over any velocity within your output and it's going to Contour in this case a velocity of 0.05 m/s if I get more more into the hotpots it's going to Contour that kind of 02 meter per second threshold this is really nice for evaluating habitat suitability criteria for for fishery engineering if you're looking at different suitable depths or velocities kind of just being able to move your mouse around the map and see where those similar velocity Contours or depth Contours exists this is a pretty cool kind of helpful quick evaluation tool which is something that we love about Ras mapper that is super cool and and but by the way this is new for me Ben sharing that now hey wh while you're doing this this is a really cool thing that I just noticed if you look at the interface 2D to 1D on the downstream end look at the disconnect you have there right this could highlight some potential problems and by turning this Contours on you can see you know ideally you would want those to be kind of inline connected and not have a little discontinuity there so so that's uh can maybe potentially pinpoint some possible errors you might get now that one looks a lot better right yeah upstreaming looks a lot better and that is interesting because Chris as you and I know from this Workshop the instabilities are at the downstream end so we we knew that already but that's right this kind of is a cool tool for evaluating that so I love those little things in Ras mapper that just make results a little bit more helpful a little bit more tangible for users to to look at that one is super cool Ben I I did not know about that feature and I'm definitely going to use that that is really cool very good right next up Chris I'm going to let you talk a little bit about large Woody debris terrain mod so this is yeah this is a new feature that was added in so we've had modifications terrain modifications available to us for a while and these are uh just ways that you could stamp some uh changes onto your terrain whether you want to like raise it up to simulate a a building or some other feature that's not captured in the terrain or or maybe you want to cut in to simulate a um maybe a an alternative Channel or something that you want to put in your design um and there's also a bunch of pre-programmed shapes a lot of them are similar to the shapes you see at peers you bridge peers like elongated and circular and um U ellipsoid or things like that but a new one was added to kind of uh fulfill the the requests of restoration modelers River restoration modelers restoration modelers like to put a lot of wood in the river I like to put trees and root wads things like that and so that there was a a need to have a new shape and so ATC put in the shape of a tree and they called it large Woody debris so if you go down there to your modifications sub layer yep and just right click on that you can go to modification shapes and you'll see large Woody debris and when you click on that give it a name and then you can just literally stamp it in there anywhere you can see the tree is already there it's got It's a pretty basic shape it just has two rectangles one representing the trunk of the tree and one representing the root ball of the tree and then you have control over the size of everything and then if you click okay here let me get a better elevation read on this so this is 287 seven roughly yeah add this and make this elevation uh say 289 yeah or probably more realistic is you would add to the terrain in this case because if you want to put a bunch of these around you're just going to be you're going to be adding it to the terrain right sitting it on there and so maybe give it a um um yeah I think it just stamps it on there based on the the size and click okay you can also change it looks like the triangular the shape of the trunk which is kind of cool Y and then you can just start stamping them wherever you want to put it and you just click okay every time and then you can you can rotate it here graphically or in the dialogue window that pops up too you click on it yeah just rotate it around see yeah make a little Log Jam there yeah and now if we hover over our terrain value you can see turn Contour distracting you see our elevation in the channel is 283 except for when we get on this log and then it's up to that higher elevation yeah based on the size of the log so pretty cool way um another way to represent large Woody debris is you know with these tree shapes is a is a good good idea you can also do a cluster of individual pilings that's another way you can do that so you could right click on modifications add a shape Circle we'll call this wood and then you could for instance add this in the middle of the channel you can you can slap those in between the trees too oh yeah good idea you just pop a bunch of those in and you can see you can just add them really really quickly now obviously the challenge with putting in shapes that are this small even though this might be realistic is you're going to have to have cell sizes that are small enough to pick up the differences in terrain so right now our geometry data as you can see is certainly not going to be discreet enough to to pick up those different elevations from those those wooden pilings so if we wanted to represent this the flow through the restoration design a little bit more accurately we'd want to use a refinement region to pick up some of those uh some of those proposed changes so yeah really cool really cool option for sure yeah you certainly want to get self is on those tree trunks y um that way Raz will see them yeah and I know a lot of um restoration users out there uh often still will prefer or use 1D modeling as opposed to 2D modeling because of some of the scour abilities um that 1D models still have the great thing about this is you can make these terrain modifications and then you can use your cross-sections to update your cross-section shape to account for shapes such as this and so there's a 1D way this tool can still be use for you as a user yeah sweet the next one up here is the render satellite image below terrain so this is one that we always get asked and for a long time the answer was sorry there's nothing really that we can do about this and the request was always hey when I toggle my aerial imagery on it's always above my terrain and sometimes I want to be able to have the terrain above my satellite imagery is there way to do that and for a long time there was not but now with some of the newer versions there is a quick way to do that uh the way you can do that is if you right click on your satellite imagery at the very bottom there's an option to render this behind the terrain if you click on that toggle this on and off you're going to see now that your aerial imagery is behind your terrain now you just need to adjust your terrain transparency which you can right click based on The View options make it a little bit more transparent and now again you can see that aor limit injury underneath your terrain data um so you have some options you can do the same thing obviously by keeping your terrain data um untransparent and then adjusting the transparency of your satellite imagery but this is an option if you uh if you want that yeah that question comes up a lot people want to have this feature so I know next up we got the changing the displayed decimal places Chris I'll let you drive this one yeah this one's pretty simple but it's kind of buried and the first time when I was looking for it I took a while for me to find it and so I figured not a lot of people may not know about this but if you uh move your cursor around on the screen B um you can see that it displays your terrain to two decimal places and most of the time that's plenty right um You Don't especially on a Terrain you probably don't need more than two decimal places um maybe in si you might want to go to a third decimal place to get to the millimeter level but but sometimes in water surface elevation you want to get a little bit more precise um or even in velocity for some reason you might want to get more precise um especially if there's not a whole lot of changing going on and so if you want to change the number of decimal places you would just go up to tools and go to options and then you go down to the second General tab under the global settings and you can see display output to and you can change it to whatever you'd like and now when Ben moves around we'll see that to four decimal places now again not necessarily needed too often because two decimal places usually is fine but sometimes you need to see um change to something a little bit more precise than two decimal places so that's how you do it good nice all right we're getting through these next up we have fix mesh feature so this is a relatively newer feature um where Raz has built in an algorithm to help help you fix any cell errors that you may have in your the red dots of death and so what Chris and I have done here is we've created the worst possible breake line orientation that you could imagine in a 2d mesh uh if you are watching it's worth looking at your screen this will give you anxiety if you are a Ras modeler but it's ex we do not endorse this setup this this is not Klein Schmid approved modeling practice but that's right is a good example of how this tool can be used effectively so if you want to use the tool to correct these mesh errors on your own and again if you just have a couple airs in a single location sometimes it's going to be easier to do yourself but if you have a very large modeling domain um this could be a real timesaver for you so to make these adjustments you can rightclick on your 2D flow area edit the geometry and then right click on that same 2D flow area and click on this little try to fix meshes a little screwdriver yeah you're G to get a dialogue that pops up it's going to say hey I tried some things and you can see we have less errors we're not quite there yet but the cool thing about this is you can do this process a couple different times almost like a batch process and eventually what you're going to see is now we're down to a little bit less a little bit less now we're down to only two errors left we do this one more time it should fix that and voila we now no longer have any sell errors in the model domain so I can right click on this save my edits and move forward modeling the worst brake line orientation imagine now I I love I love that they named it try to fix spell errors because yeah I mean it's it's not possible a lot of times to get them all so and especially on the first try so it may take several tries but um Ben and I were messing around with this a little earlier and we had a setup where we couldn't it just wouldn't get them all like you would fix some and that would create others you'd fix those it create others so sometimes it's not going to work but a lot of times it's a really convenient way to get rid of some spot errors especially if you um you know you have manual edits to your Cs and then you go regenerate your mesh and all these red dots show up again and then you don't this way you don't have to go in and manually fix each and every one of them like we used to you just hit the try fix all and no they go yep good good all right next up Chris why don't you talk a little bit about downloading terrain data I love this feature because uh I hate searching the internet for terrain data for elevation data sets um I mean we all know USGS has has a DAT um a website where you can get uh demms from and there's other sites as well but HC has put in this really cool feature where where it will scour the web for you um obviously it's not going to pick up every single elevation data set that's out there but it's going to go through the uh the more typical sources and it's going to look for terrain data that falls within your modeling extent so yeah if you click on that USGS here we're going to look for all USGS data and you can Define how you want to search for this do you want to look for data that just Falls within your current view or within the extents of your geometry or specify a shape file or even give lat long normally we just zoom in to where we want to be and go current View and then the data types we're going to want to get elevation models and you just hit the query products it's really easy click that button and then everything that Raz is able to find shows up here and you can evaluate hey is this something I'm interested in or no thanks like the 30 meter stuff you probably don't want for most Raz applications but you see there's a one meter set there hey that looks pretty good and when you click on it um if you check that box next to it it show actually shows up you can move that window to the side it shows up the extent of the terrain data on your Ras MPP R viwer yeah so you can see those boxes right so there's the coverage that we have for what's uh checked in the um window there very cool yeah I like this because it ows you to sort by cell size too so if you have a certain cell size threshold that you want to use this allows you to yeah use that it also has the link to the metadata On Us gs's website which is a good way of of recording where that data is coming from and whatnot yeah which you'll want to know for sure and and you can also check um you know if you're just not interested in 10 or 30 meters just check um check the one you are interested in yeah for that filter yeah um and then yeah click okay and then now that's not going to make it a Terrain for you it's just going to download the elevation data set the geotiff right and so what you got to do is then go and create your terrain but you'll see that that's already in a folder called USGS created for you it should be in your project directory there it is right there y oops I didn't actually download it because I didn't download it but it would be in yeah but it'll be in that USGS folder and then you can just make a Terrain out of it and if you've got multiple elevation data sets uh Raz will tile them all together and make sure you use the create stitches and that'll fill in some blanks for you if you have them y awesome uh next up is the split selected line feature this is also one that's newer or at least newer to my knowledge um for a long time the only way that you could split a 1D reach in Ras mapper was to um cop the way I used to do is I used to copy the line feature so there was a duplicate and then I would adjust the length of each one so that it split it up kind of into two reaches um there was also a kind of a more cumbersome way to do this in the geometry data editor which involved drawing in dummy reaches splitting up the reach and then deleting them uh now in Ras mapper it's much easier to do this all you need to do is if you have any line features could be a cross-section it could be a River Center Line you can edit that line feature use the edit make sure you're using the edit feature selector and then zoom in and anywhere along this line if you right click you're going to have a bunch of different options you can actually invert the direction of that line that's a quick one you can split the selected line and then there's also some additional Geo spatial operations but the split selected line is really ni if you click on this it's going to automatically split your River Reach it's going to ask you to name the lower one as well as the upper one and now instead of having one single 2D reach here or 1D reach I to say I have two of them um and that can be helpful particularly uh if you takeing Chris I class often times if we need to insert an inline 2D area we're going to need to split up our 1D reach delete a portion of it and then insert a 2d area this is a very quick way to do that with an Ras mapper yeah I think it's about time we update that Workshop what do you think Ben to do it this way this is a way better way than the uh the old school way well you know sometimes it builds character to learn how to so I'm working with a senior design uh class right now at kagi University and um there's been a few different instances where I could have shown them the easy way but I wanted them to build some character so taught them how to do things the old school yeah yeah that's good building character what about multiple stored Maps Chris what are your thoughts on that yeah so occasionally you'll you'll have a project project where you've just got to create a lot of raster Maps it could be at different time intervals during your simulation it could be you just have a ton of plans maybe you've got you know 80 plans and you've run them all and now you got to create these um these static Maps so you can share them with somebody export it somewhere else you know you could you could do one at a time and that's what we used to have to do or you can come in and right click like Ben has just done and actually no you would go up to tools um this works oh yeah yeah yeah that that's one way there's actually another way to do it too under Tools I believe but yeah um create multiple Maps there yeah so either way brings you into this dialogue window here and you just select the plans that you want to make maps for if you hold the control key down you can select multiple um and then same thing with profiles you can select one or multiples again holding your control key down and then all the map types that you're interested in making and then once you've got all that figured out then you can decide on the left I mean obviously you're going through this process so so you want to check the box that says compute Maps right but the one next to it do you want to actually add that into to your Ras mapper or just dump them into a folder in your project directory and you probably if you're doing a lot of them you just want to put it in the folder you don't necessarily want to clutter up your layer manager on the left so you click okay and I'm going to warn you not to do this B because we'll be sitting here all afternoon with all these different Maps yeah this this will take a long time if you're doing multiple like a lot of multiple Maps so just be careful with it um be ready to kind of walk away and come back a couple hours later if you've got a lot of maps you're creating this is a great way to do do that all automatically let me throw you a curveball Chris you said that of course you're going to want to have this compute map dialogue turned on I don't necessarily agree with you on that the reason for that yeah you're right yeah is if you have a situation where let's say you know you need to create inundation map inundation boundaries which are stored Maps they're not Dynamic Maps inundation boundaries are always stored Maps so let's say you need to create an inundation boundary of the maximum condition for each one of your plans right that's what this would look like here um if you were doing that and you didn't want to sit here forever and wait for this to compute you could actually turn this off add those Maps um to you you probably want to add them to Ras mapper so that they showed up then what you could do is you could come into your plan data and before you run your unsteady flow plan you could turn on your flood plane mapping what this does is it updates it computes any store map associated with this plan so what this means is that you could set up a you know maybe run multiple plans you set up each of these to run you have flood plan mapping turned on each one you run it and then you come back the next day and not only have your plans all run so you have updated new plans but you come into Ras mapper and those maps that you added are all going to be computed so it can actually be a timesaver to potentially not compute those UPF front depending on you know what your objectives are yeah yeah that's that is a really good point Ben I'm glad you brought that up I I might use this for corant number Maps because i' I've always thought corant number map should be a default map um along with depth velocity water surface and I'll frequently go in and add them one at a time but um yeah now the downside is this these will be stored Maps meaning you're not going to have Dynamic maps that you can animate they'll just be stored at whatever profile you pick y yeah all right uh next up we got import methods import features from shape file this is will be another quick one so for a long time and again many of you who are or up to date than Chris and I were uh a couple months ago um I was always or I was under the impression until not too long ago that if you wanted to bring in a shape file let's say a shape file of a River Center Line from another GIS project um and you wanted to bring that in and use that for your River Center Line and your 1D model you could do that but you'd have to bring it in a a feature layer so you would come under project add a reference layer navigate to that shape file bring it in and then it would just be kind of like a functionless reference layer that would exist in here you could then click on that layer copy it and paste it into your River Center Line and it would work but that's obviously a couple extra steps now they have we have the ability to import a shape file directly into any active layer so if we want to for instance import a new River Center Line from a shape file layer we can right click on this um we'll need to edit the geometry import feature from shape file and then we're going to navigate to where that shape file exists so I'm going to click on this little folder here navigate to where I have a shape file saved and the cool thing about this feature is it actually plots it on this map for you so you can see exactly what you're bringing in make sure that it's what you're expecting um it'll show you exactly where that line is and then depending on the type of feature so in this case this is just a River Center Line you can establish different components of that line um depending on the different attributes that are associated with the shape pile itself so for River Center Line there's not a whole lot of options here again you could give it a particular River name based on an attribute in the shape aisle reach name the interesting thing is if you do this for a cross-section layer because cross-sections have a lot of potential attributes that you would need to fill out and sometimes that information is all contained within um a the shape file information itself and so I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of this right click on cross-sections import the layer from a shape file and to navigate to that same folder and then what you're going to notice is down below we don't have three or four different options to assign attributes we have many many and these are going to be your leftover Banks your roughness values your contraction expansion skew Levy stationing anything that you could really want to associate a cross-section with you have the ability to customize that now many shape files might not have any of this information and so this wouldn't be helpful but there are going to be some shape files out there that have all of this for instance there's some FEMA so oftentimes if you download raw FEMA data from an FIS study those shape files are going to have all this information so you now have the ability to import that um and save yourself a lot of time potentially making Raz easier one version at a time there you go that's um pretty cool all right next up Chris you got exporting rasters from Dynamic Mets yeah so so it used to be if you wanted to export a raster uh maybe you want to send it to a client or another colleague or uh maybe you want to send it to your favorite GIS person for them to make a really nice looking map for you um you would have to create a stored map of the profile that you're interested in and then you'd have this extra stored map down in the list there and would go in a folder in your project directory great but there's a lot of steps to it and then it ended you ended up with a stored map that maybe you don't really care about or need going forward now in uh the latest version of Raz you can rightclick on any Dynamic map like this depth map that Ben is clicking on and you can export a raster right from there you don't have to create a stored map now it's going to ask you okay um what's the extent that you wish to use it gives you the option of a buffer beyond that extent you want to add a little bit to it maybe 10% Beyond and then uh I think the cell size is optional I think it'll take the um the actual um cell size uh or sorry the terrain cell size when it creates it U but I suppose you have an option to do something different and it'll just up or down sample that accordingly yeah so not only is this a time saer in terms of not having to export stored maps to get GIS raster data this also is nice because there's many instances where you will have a large modeling domain but you don't necessarily need the raster data for the entire modeling domain you might only need it for a very small segment of that maybe an area of Interest or a focused area what this allows you to do is it allows you to zoom into that area of Interest maybe it's this restoration site for instance and I can export a raster data set just for this area and that would be again based on The View extent that's going to be a much smaller raster data set to work with easier to move around easier to send to a GIS person so a lot of really cool potential benefits with this yeah great next up we have the final end value map this is a quick one but something I think is worth pointing out um the idea here is many times when you're doing 1D 2D inline modeling um one of the secrets of success Chris and I talked about is making sure that your model geometry between your 2D boundary and your 1D cross-section is the same Manny's end value falls into that um in terms of needing to make sure that those values are are the same or very very similar and if not you can end up with some instabilities at that 1D 2D boundary um so if you want to add a final endv value map to any result layer you can right click on that um create a result layer map scroll down under Hydraulics to Final End values and then add that map and what that will do is we turn that on you can see that this shows all the end value for not only your 1D cross-sections but your 2D area as well if we zoom into our 1D 2D boundary you can quickly see that in our 2D area we're using 03 in the channel 04 in the channel for the 1D cross-section so pretty similar same with the flood plane uh just about a 100th off so this probably isn't going to be problematic but this is a really fast way to qaqc those 1D 2D connections um and make sure that you're geometry is not too different yeah that's a good one um we should be checking that every time agree yeah you're up next Chris you got create empty land cover layers yes so under your map layers we have all of our classification layers available in here we can add n values infiltration layers soils layers sediment bed material layers Etc and this this will probably continue to grow over the years with every new version that comes out but it used to be if you wanted to create one of these new layers in Raz you would have to bring in a already produced shape file or um geotiff and yeah just like Ben's doing here and then bring it in and then you'll have it as a classification layer in Raz but what if you don't have that shape file and maybe you're not maybe you're like me and you're not super comfortable working in arcgis but you're really comfortable in Ras mapper well now you can hit that create empty you don't have to do anything in this window just go right down to create empty it's going to create a an empty classification layer in this case for land cover and then you can come right in Ras mapper and just add your polygons right here inside a Ras mapper so obviously yeah you got to get into edit mode and then will draw some polygons and in some areas here I was hoping to be able to turn on the terrain data oh it's because I have this beneath yeah so now if you uh you just click some polygons to Define common areas of Manny's roughness and as soon as you you finish you double click it's going to prompt you for a name and the Manning's end value that goes with it so you can build your Manning's end table as you go now when you're ready to start adding more polygons one of the things Raz is is not good at is snapping features together so what I've learned is if you overlap like Ben's doing right here you can make use of the clip feature that we do have in Raz so if you right click and go down to geospatial operations there's these clipping features and so here you would clip and discard the overlap and now you've effectively snapped it to to the one next to it you can do the same thing for all of them now you have three polygon that are all s together no yep no overlaps and no gaps and that's what you want with your n value layer so nice love that yeah all right next up we got plot 1D profiles and tables for mapper this is again a quick one but something that's useful oftentimes I find myself going back and forth between the main Ras window to look at 1D results and Ras mapper to look atti results what I didn't realize until recently you can right click on any any result layer and you can plot result profiles 1D profiles as well as um plotting the 1D output data for um your 1D model portions of your model as well and that's going to show up just like it would in your 1D output from the main Ras window but now you have the ability to do that directly from rasap so saves you a little bit of back and forth yep a good one next well just down to a few more here we got remove missing layers Chris I'll let you talk about this one yeah so a pretty simple tool but very effective because sometimes when you let's say you change the name of your project or maybe you move it to a different directory uh we've all done these kinds of things and then you come into Ras mapper and you realize ah I've got all of these missing layers like Raz doesn't know where they are because the path got screwed up or it's just changed names and so you've got all these kind of redundant layers in here uh you used to have to go right click on each one and remove them and if you've got like 50 of them it takes a long time to do that it's very annoying so now you can go under Tools and just hit the option to remove missing layers and it'll give you a little summary of what it did in this case we don't have any missing layers so it didn't give us any but if you did it would get rid of them and clean it up really nice for you huge huge time saer don't want to overstate that one that one's very cool yeah all right and then the last one here is the show the show compute messages and this is kind of similar to the idea of displaying 1D output data directly from rasma or it just saves you a step in terms of going in plan data so all you do here is on any result output you can right click on the plan um I thought it was under results Chris where is it actually located it is no it's there just go down it's about halfway down mes and this is going to bring up those computation messages that we're all used to you can see this one's nice and happy no red marks no erors this is a good little model run here but just a quick way again we talk about the fact that Raz is moving towards Ras mapper being kind of the sole um creation tool the sole space that Ras modelers live in and all these little ads that allow you to view things that you don't have to go back to the main Raz window you don't have to go to the geometry editor you don't have to go to the 1D output all of that being added into Ras mapper is kind of the direction things are going so that makes sense yeah and let's you know where this is really useful I use this all the time is let's say you've got some errors in your run now this particular run didn't have errors but let's say you had some errors and you wanted to go in and fix them well you got to know what cell they're taking place in so you could come into your compute messages right here have it off side look for those errors look for the cell that goes with the error then you come back here and just right click anywhere on your 2D area and uh search on that cell and you can zoom in and kind of get an idea of what's going on there and um hopefully fix it it's a great way for troubleshooting um and just diagnosing the errors that you have in your model runs very good and then the last one which we're just going to tease because it was one that we started going down the path of talking about and realize that it deserves its own episode and that is around calculated Maps so if some of you showed up today hoping that we would touch on calculated Maps apologies but we do have a plan to have this be a standalone topic on a future episode calculated maps are really cool um the idea there is if you don't have a map that is um that is default you have the ability to create your own calculated layer based on any number of different things it can be output maps that are created within Raz it can be your own code that you input in here very customizable extremely powerful um and so we're going to save this topic for a future episode but just be aware that we're definitely excited to share more with you all about using the uh rter calculat yeah so brush up on your Visual Basic or python skills for the next one because we're going to get into some nerd stuff good awesome well Chris that's all I had for this technical topic today are you uh ready to close this out yeah but as we mentioned before I'm sure there are some other hidden secrets we don't know about let us know um paste it into the uh LinkedIn site um you'll you'll see it it's out there or comment in the in this video right in the comments we'd love to learn about it and share that with other people as well or you know if you've uh if we messed up on anything here let us know but hopefully uh we got a lot of good information out to you that uh is going to be really helpful sweet well thanks everybody for joining us today uh next month we will be discussing 2D Bridges um we'll be doing a light introduction on 2D Bridges talking about some best practices and potential P pitfalls now 2D bridges are one of those features that are are definitely on the newer side of things and definitely something that I feel like Chris whenever we teach our 1D 2D Raz class uh we always learn something new from students about their experience using 2D Bridges so in the same light if you have used 2D Bridges and your experience within HC RZ let us know what you think was there anything that you likeed that you didn't like were there maybe tricks that you learned um in terms of making that process a little bit more efficient or effective uh we want to learn uh hear more from you on on that particular topic and then again next month that's what we will plan on covering also make sure to if you if you have a chance give us us some background information on YouTube just to learn for us to learn more about you a listener um how' you learn about the podcast how often do you use Raz and what would you like to see from the show because ultimately this is just Chris and I getting together once a month talking about Raz if there's things that people are really interested in or things that people would like to see this show kind of turn into we want to accommodate that as best as we can so Chris it's great to be back 2024 is upon us um and I'm really excited to talk to you on a monthly basis about about this software yeah great to be back and I'm looking forward to it as well so uh we'll see you guys all uh next month and um happy Ras modeling don't forget if you're interested in taking our online instruction the dates for that are going to be October 9th through November 13th we'll have the registration for that open shortly and then likewise if you're more of an in-person training type of person uh the link for the inperson Atlanta Georgia class from September 10th to 12th will be available um probably by the time this podcast gets posted so keep an eye out we'd love to have you in class um and thank you all for joining once again this is full momentum and HC Raz podcast until next time

Channel: The RAS Solution

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Id: 0DPPd2oUlKo

Length: 67min 10sec (4030 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024