Auto Landscape gha

Hi,

Just developed a plugin which can generate landscape automatically with elevation data from Google Map.

Just input Location(Latitude and Longitude) and area (m2) and the component can generate a squared landscape centered with the input location.

Output are the landscape surface and points (you can manipulate and then loft to landscape surface yourself)

The aware of the limitation as also mention the in ghowl http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/elevation/#Limits

A example is attached, compare it with location(-8.2168,115.357394) in google earch.

Have Fun!

Xiaoming

Attachments:

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Charles C Vincent on December 29, 2011 at 4:58am

Cool. Very cool!!! Thanks

Permalink Reply by Stanislas Petit on December 30, 2011 at 4:48am

Hi Xiaoming.

Great tool !

There are other GIS Servers that can provide FREE data, like ArcGIS (http://www.arcgis.com/home/index.html), but I doubt the resolution is as fine as Google Map's...

http://www.arcgis.com/home/index.html

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on January 8, 2012 at 10:58pm

Thank you. It is very helpful. Instead of show elevation, there could be many more applications.

Permalink Reply by WT4 on January 7, 2012 at 12:01pm

Very nice. Was wondering whether it is possible to output the absolute coordinate of the South West corner of the patch so that I can 'stitch' the patches together since there appears to be a limit to the number of points that can be handled at any one time.

Thanks

William

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on January 8, 2012 at 11:15pm

Good advice. Actually, when I first started to develop this plugin, I thought about it. The initial idea is to output centre coordinate of the 8 neighbouring patches so in total 9 of them could be stitched and became one big patch.

I have to admit I get lazy and also need to work on my thesis, I dropped the idea in the end.

Here is a temporary solution. Please try it out. It stitch three patches together. Hope it is useful.

Attachments:

stitch.gh, 12 KB

Permalink Reply by Gavin on January 13, 2012 at 4:29pm

Hi. What a great component: it worked fine before the last Rhino/GH update, but generates component errors in my system now. Can you look to see if it is your components, definition, or assemblies?

thanks,

Gavin

Permalink Reply by Gavin on January 13, 2012 at 4:30pm

... it really is a great component!! but doesn't seem to work at the moment...

Permalink Reply by Gavin on January 13, 2012 at 6:07pm

HI. I just saw David's message re C# and VB, I updated the assembly and now the autolandscape component works well.

Many thanks again.

Gavin

Permalink Reply by Claudio on February 1, 2012 at 9:40am

Hello Xiaoming, I've just downloaded your component and it seams to be very promising. But as it works fine with the example location (-8.2168,115.357394). I've try it with some other location near my region of the world (one that I know) and it gives me an almost flat geometry. Its a small mountain in my city (montreal) here are the coordinates (latitude 45°30'18.76"N - longitude 73°35'34.71"W) I've converted them to decimals in order to input the right values into the component. Also its maybe the area of the location that is to small. What are the units you've used for this input?

Can you help on this?

Thank you for your time and effort

cheers

claudio

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on February 1, 2012 at 7:43pm

Hi Claudio,
Thank you for using the component.
The unit I use is meter, you might need to convert from inch.
For the error you have now I think there are two possible reasons:
(1) For google map, longitude for west need a "-" in front, so the location you mentioned on google maps is at (45.505211,-73.592975)
(2) The dimension setting for the component. Please check on map the size of the landscape and make sure the landscape you want to model is in the region you entered for the component. The default area is 1e6 square meter(1 square kilometre).
Please try the gh file attached, it is centred on top of the small mountain (45.506497,-73.587112). Hope this is helpful. Have Fun!

Regards,
Xiaoming

Attachments:

autolandscape@Montreal.gh, 4 KB

Permalink Reply by Ching on February 8, 2012 at 5:52pm

Hi Xiaooming,

This thing rocks. I had plenty fun playing with it making contour maps etc and I can imagine it will save me a lot of time in the future to do any landscape models. Really appreciate your effort and looking forward to any future developments especially the stitching feature! One thing I would like to add would be mentioning "this is in square meter" in the tooltip of the inputs just to make it easier to understand (I had to read through this thread to find out it's in meter).

Also I seem to have hit the number of requests limit set by Google and I can't generate anything at all at the moment. Hopefully it is gonna reset tomorrow. Putting a warning label in the tooltip of the component will be a neat thing to do I reckon.

Regards,

Ching

Permalink Reply by Xiaoming Yang on February 14, 2012 at 5:54am

Hi Ching,

I am very glad you like the component. For the unit, actually I mentioned in the post that the area is in m2, but I guess it is confusing...Thank you for the advise, I should make it more clear.

The file you posted below it great, model large area is possible and easy now. Thank you!

Regards,

Xiaoming