Auto Landscape gha

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ching on February 9, 2012 at 10:13pm

Finally got it working after playing around with the maths I am most afraid of. This is a 3 by 3 definition in which you just need to input the cooordinates for the centre. Not sure how to stitch the result landscape pieces together though, I think they might not be perfectly aligned. Any improvements welcome.

Attachments:

• landscape stitch.gh, 34 KB

Permalink Reply by Matthew Owens on February 17, 2012 at 3:18am

Thank you for this- I am really having fun with it.

 

Any plans to connect additional databases?  Google Earth is nice for Architects, but having geological surveys would be much better for Engineers.

 

Also, having the ability to generate stitched topographies within the component would be amazing.  I guess you are using Rhino 5 (which I do not have) for the stitching definition?  I look forward to future improvements.

 

Thank you again!!!!

Permalink Reply by Ching on February 17, 2012 at 5:02am

Actually there is another plug-in called Elk (here) which has the ability to generate topography over a much bigger area with data from NASA, but the resolution might not be as high or as accurate as google's data (please correct if I'm wrong):

"SRTM1 data is sampled at one arcsecond (about 30 meters) and SRTM3 data is sampled at three arcseconds (about 90 meters).  The higher resolution SRTM1 data is available for most of the US and the lower res SRTM3 data is available for most of the world."

The 3x3 stitching definition above is done in Rhino 4 but it doesn't actually "stitch together" or merge the surfaces into one. I had to do it manually in Rhino with the merge surfaces command. Which I think does a better job than grasshopper.

Also I think the calculations within it (distance of one degree change in lat/lng) won't be accurate enough (or high enough in resolution) even though they are correct so I cannot guarantee the 3x3 pieces are perfectly neighbouring sets of data (they might contain very very tiny strips of overlapped/missed topography data). However this error is really insignificant next to the limited resolution of the generated topography so it is neglectable if you're not a perfectionist like me.

Edit: For bigger areas Elk is much easier, but for smaller areas where you want to specify the area size Xiaoming's component is more convenient I think.

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on February 17, 2012 at 6:34am

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/elk/forum/topics/comparison-betw...

Check out this comparison I did with the available datasets accessible through a web API.

Permalink Reply by Ching on February 17, 2012 at 7:19am

Thanks, this is immensely useful.

Edit: The data from Google and NASA have bigger differences than I thought, interesting.

Permalink Reply by Joris Hoogeboom on February 18, 2015 at 4:03am

Very useful component, any ambition in open-sourcing this?

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on February 24, 2015 at 4:26am

Hi Joris,

Sorry for the late reply. I have not use it for a long time. I diged out the code as replied below.

Xiaoming

Permalink Reply by Joris Hoogeboom on February 24, 2015 at 5:54am

Very cool, thanks! You made it because it was useful for you one time, but not anymore? Just wondering why this faded out a little bit.

I am mainly interested how you are doing the XY-geo coord conversion and how you batch the google requests. But it seems no batching occurs? I'm asking because it seems to be a very limiting factor in the elevation API, the resolution decreases with the number of points per request, but the number of requests per 24-h is very limited. Trying to maximize the resolution I can get for an area by batching the points.

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on February 24, 2015 at 4:25am

Source code attached.

Attachments:

• autoLandscape.zip, 59 KB

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