Surfacing a survey also creates a design

This is a concept that can be confusing at first. When you surface a set of collected survey points you create a terrain model of the original elevation in the field. This is expected. But T3RRA software also automatically creates a design surface for you as well. This design surface is an exact duplicate of the original elevation surface.

Because T3RRA software allows you to create design surfaces in separate regions of a field, and also create design surfaces based on existing design surfaces, it makes sense to always have a base layer to work off. And this base layer is an exact duplicate of the original surface.

A side effect of this automatic creation of design layers is that you can go straight to implementation after surfacing even if you have not specifically created a design (surfacing is normally automatic, so really you can usually skip directly to implementing directly after collecting!).  A design surface does exist, it’s just that the cut/fill map is made up of 0 values for the whole field.