Beginning a 3-D Site Model with Data From Grographic Information Systems

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/gis/manual/arcgis2sku/index.htm

忙，闲了翻译一下

These days, ost cities have an infrastructure of information representing building footprints, building height information, aerial photography, and information about the elevation of the terrain. These resources are maintained with coordinate systems that permit them to be composited into a rough three-dimensional model of the city. Though many buildings are not adequately represented by merely extruding their footprints, these models may be a good starting place for understanding the massing of an area.

We can easily use GIS to view this 3d information to get a sense of the relationship of a site and its surroundings, but if we want to begin to fix up the representations of buildings, and add other 3d features such as bridges, we can export our 3d data about buildings and terrain form GIS to a 3d modeling package. This has been made into a very simple process thanks to a plugin for ArcGIS that exports data to Sketchup. From here, data can be exported once more into 3d Studio Max, if one should want to go that way.

The Basic Procedure

1. Understand the data
2. Clip the terrain and image information
3. Build a terrain model (TIN)
4. Install the ArcGIS Sketchup Interchange Plugin
5. Export vector data to SketchUp
6. Import aerial to SketchUp
7. Tips for modeling on terrain in SketchUp

Understand the Data

The LIDAR Survey The people of Massacusetts are blessed with a superlative infrastructure of geographic information, which very effectively collected, maintained and made available byt the Commonwealth's Geographic Information System, MassGIS. MassGIS, in collaboration with the Masachusetts Emergency Management Agency collected a three-dimensional scan of the city of Boston and surrounding towns. This laser scan yielded the elevations of the buildings and trees and the ground in between. The original LIDAR point-cloud was processed in several ways to yield, among other things, a First Return raster of even;y-spaced elevations at a resolution of one-meter per pixel, and a vector database recording the Footprints of each building, with its ground elevation, and an approximation of the height of the roof for each footprint for 400,000 buildings. THis sort of data is state of the art, and although many cities are developing this sort of information infrastructure, we in boston are particularly lucky to have this sneak-preview of what is just over the horizon in the GIS world.

Other Data: In addition to the data from the MassGIS LIDAR survey, we are also going to use an orthometrically corrected aerial photograph of Boston purchased from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission. This photo has a pixel resolution of 0.8 feet per-pixel. Even tough the LIDAR survey provides us with a very good terrain model, we find it actually too detailed for our purposes, so we include a clip from the National Elevation Dataset, from the U.S. Geological Survey, which is much smoother at 30 meters per-pixel.

Data Infrastructure: we should pause here to consider how wonderful it is to live in a society where this sort of information is shared! To learn how to download your own clips from the National Elevation Dataset, see Downloading Terrain Models from the GSD's GIS Manual.

Accessing the Data

For the purpose of this tutorial, we have clipped out a section from each of the layers described above so that we won't all be hitting the server simultaneously.

When connected to the GSD's local area network, you have access to all of these data, seamlessly across the coverage from Everett in the North to Quncy inthe SOuth and Arlington to the West. This is made possible by our Spatial Data Engine server. YOu can find all of this by double-clicking the file, L:/public/geo/gis_demo/detail2d.mxd. Please don't use the server-based version during lab sessions!!!

Words Highlighited like this may be looked up in ArcMap on-line help.

Clipping Data for our study area

Even though our tutorial dataset is more-or-less clipped to include Fenway park and Kenmore square, we are going to go through the process of clipping data here for a couple of reasons: First, because when you are working with data from the server, you must begin by clipping your data to avoid making models of the entire reagion. And second, because having your image and terrain model clipped exactly the same is what enables you to get them lined up again when you get them to SketchUp.

Clipping your Orthophoto

Because our terrain raster has a rather coarse cell-size, the edges of our terrain model are not excatly alighed with the edge of your data frame. But when we get our terrain model into sketchup, we will have to regisdter our aerial photo to it. The easiest way to do this is to make sure that your image is clipped to the exact extent of your terrain model. There is a command that should do this, but it seems to be buggy, so we will painstakingly adjust our map scale so that our terrain model is exactly framed by the map window then we will export the image, clipping it to the extent of the view.

You now have a nicely clipped datset including a matched triangulated terrain model and high-resolution orthophoto! The next step is to import these, and your buildings into sketchup.

Moving Terrain Models, Georeferenced Images and Extruded Buildings from ArcGIS

The meat of this tutorial will be setting the stage for our modeling and analytical project by importing important contextual information from ArcGIS into sketchup. Then we can do some of the same simple modeling experiments on the site model that we have been developing in GIS. THe next tutorial will discuss the more complicated issues of modeling on terrain in sketchup.

Beginning Resources

Right Click Here, open this archive of tutorial data and extract its contents to a folder in your C:/temp directory. This sample data set contains the basic elements required for this demonstration.

We will open the ArcMap project contained in your tutorial dataset and examine these layers an their attributes. Then we will install the ArcGIS-Sketchup Plugin and export all of this data to sketchup.

Install the Sketchup Plugin for ArcGIS

You will find sketchup installed on all of the public computers at the GSD, but because of peculiarities of the sketchup arcgis plugin, each user must install the ArcGIS plugin on the computer and load the special sketchup tool into ArcGIS. The resources and instructions for installing Sketcup and the ESRI ArcGIS plugin are available in the GSD software directory L:/public/software/winapps/sketchup. If you are using a lab machine the only thing you need to do is load the sketchup plugin into ArcGIS.

Exporting your Site Model Components to Sketchup

So, there is a lot of value in this building data and terrain data that we have in GIS. In this case we have built our own terrain model. In other cases we may want to import a model of the existing condition that we can get for free on the web from the US Geological Survey -- see Obtaining Digital Terrain Models from the Web these raster elevatioin models can be quickly turned into TINs using the Raster to Tin

In this case though, we have a TIN and some building polygons. It is suprizingly easy to get this data into sketchup as 3d buildings and 3d terrain. Accomplishing the same transfer between any other GIS package and any other 3d package is nearly impossible. We hope that the other vendors will figure this out, soon! For reasons that will become clear later, we also want to export the rectangle that defines our site boundary. The following steps will accomplish this task:

Congratulations, your site model has just passed from two-and-a-half dimensionnal world of GIS into three-dimensional modeling world!

Exploring and Finishing your Sketchup Site Representation

Making the transition from ArcGIS to sketchup means that we have some new interfaces and models for data organization to learn. Our goal in this is to have greater flexibility in creating more realistic 3d geometry, and to have better representation of light and shadow, so it will be worh it. What we learn about Layers, Components, Textures, and Shadows will carry over, to a large degree, to other 3d modeling interfaces we might encounter.

First we wil learn about layers and how to organize our data on them. Then we will create a new frame to hold our image Import the image Project the image onto our terrain surface Smooth the terrain Surface

Taking a Deeper Look at Data Organization in Sketchup

We continually stress that the key to sanity when dealing with computers is to keep your data organized logically. The secret to being able to share information with others is to observe conventions in information management. A few minutes spent dhere, looking at how a Sketchup document is organized will help us understand sketchup and make it behave more predictably. In the introductory sketchup demo above, we learned about making objects, using materials, and creating and using components. Now we will look at a higher order of organization -- Layers and we will learn to make a particular type of projected texture that can be draped on our terrain surface to inform it with meaningful colors.

About Components and Layers

I may as well say up front that this is fairly confusing, yet very important to understand how entities, and components and layers are related. This will help us to control exactly what we are editng, and what we aren't editing, what is visible and what is not visible. I shouldn't need to emphasize how important these concepts are. In this exploration we will begin by looking at the layers that are left to us by the export process.

Coloring your Model

The final step in integrating our site information from GIS is to integrate meaningful colors for our surface. An easy way to do this is to create an image that matches the extents of our terrain model, bring this image into sketchup and position it directly under the terrain model, and project this image as atexture onto all of the faces of our terrain surface.