Disappearing Terrain in HEC-RAS – How to Fix this Annoying Glitch in HEC-RAS

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If you have been using HEC-RAS for a while, there is a good chance that you have run into the “disappearing terrain” issue. Yes, I am talking about when your background terrain disappears from the Geometric Data Editor. Although it is annoying, this is a fairly common problem. Fortunately, I am going to share some things you can do to fix this problem.

Check Your Terrain Associations

Make sure that your geometry file is associated with your terrain. You can verify this by navigating to the RAS Mapper, right-clicking Geometries, and clicking Manage Geometry Associations. Then select your current terrain and click Close.

Toggle the Plot Terrain Button

Next, try toggling the “Plot Terrain” button in the Geometric Data Editor. Do this by navigating to the Geometric Data Editor, clicking the blue and green Background Layers on Schematic button on the right side of the screen, and toggling the Plot Terrain check box.

Disappearing Terrain in HEC-RAS

If the steps listed above do not solve the problem, try the following. Most of the time this will solve the issue.

  1. Save your geometry and close the Geometric Data Editor
  2. Close RAS Mapper
  3. Save your HEC-RAS project
  4. Open RAS Mapper
  5. Open the Geometric Data Editor while keeping RAS Mapper open
  6. Pan around in the Geometric Data Editor (CTRL + left click to pan)

Most of the time, this will bring your terrain data back. If some terrain features in RAS Mapper are still missing from the Geometric Data Editor, try toggling the Plot terrain check box again.  If these steps still don’t bring your terrain back, you can usually solve this problem by closing HEC-RAS and opening it again.

Checking Your View Extents

Sometimes, HEC-RAS will set some funky schematic view extents (most of the time, near the origin) in the Geometric Data Editor. Check the bottom of the Geometric Data Editor as shown below to see if this is the case.

If your view extents are incorrect, try clicking File 🡪 Delete Geometry Data. Then click the problem Geometry file in the Delete Geometry File dialog box. Finally, click OK when asked “Delete Geometry file with title “Filename”?” and “Clear current Geometry data from memory?.” The Geometric Data Editor will remain open and should zoom to the real extent of your project.

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