Bare earth LIDAR to produce 3D cityscapes
I’ve been working with an architect on a project in Camden that allowed me to incorporate some of my 3D modeling skills.
I firmly believe that incorporating 3D visualization (even if its hand-drawn perspective renderings) is key to any development or planning project. Most people cannot make sense of plan or elevation views. Detailed street sections are completely incomprehensible to the average person. 3D perspectives allow the public to get a better sense of what the physical structure will look like. 3D tools like SketchUp give the planners and developers a quick way to visualize a project and then distribute through Google Earth.
After drawing some of the surrounding buildings in by hand, I had a realization: Camden was recently included in a LIDAR flight that was then added to the USGS’s CLICK website. I downloaded the data and after a little geoprocessing, I managed to get a working 3D model in Sketchup from LIDAR data.
I had to trim the LIDAR data down to about 7 Camden blocks to make it manageable. A 7 block area is still 197,000 return points, which needless to say is a large amount of data.
I then created a TIN from the LIDAR data.
SketchUp has a plugin for ArcGIS that will export Feature Classes and TINs to a SketchUp file.
I’ll now use this as the base for the surrounding buildings and to make modifications to the buildings I already modeled.
Aw shucks, I could have made this with some spray can Styrofoam! And I would have even added some model moss attached to toothpicks for trees!