I've got a project surveying large lengths of the Colorado River with total station ground topo and multibeam bathymetry. The end result will be an ESRI ArcMap DEM.
The issue is breaklines. The total station data was collected w/ breaklines defining water's edge, dune tops, cutbank edges/bases etc with random topo coverage in between. It seems I have two choices for combining the two data sources:
1) export grids from Carlson of the total station data and combine it with the multibeam (already gridded at 0.25 m) in ARC; or
2) combine the topo and multibeam data in Carlson so that I can more readily add/change breaklines to represent the best surface.
If I go the latter route a potential limitation is the number of points Carlson can handle. I have Carlson 2010 w/ Intellicad. I believe if you go alphanumeric the program can handle more but I'm talking potentially millions of points. The program already freezes up when I manually edit a crd file and try to save it. Would I need the point cloud module? Anyone else have experience with extremely large datasets in Carlson? Thanks for any input.
Joe