Getting building heights from GIS

Hi all,

I’ve found ways to get building heights from GIS data and OpenStreetMap using add-ons on more animation-oriented modeling programs like Blendr. Examples:

(Blosm for Blender: Google 3D cities, OpenStreetMap, terrain)
GitHub - domlysz/BlenderGIS: Blender addons to make the bridge between Blender and geographic data

I typically would prefer to just go directly into Rhino. I’ve seen some ways to do this using Grasshopper but haven’t had much success yet. Does anyone know of a plugin or a way to do this I might be overlooking?

Thanks,
Paul

2 Likes

Hi @pdfaze ,

There may be others, but take a look at Heron plugin as I believe it returns building geometry with heights.

Heron Overview Video

Skip to the 14 minute mark to see how to utilize the building height data.

Perhaps that one will work for your needs.

All the best!

1 Like

For OSM data I was impressed by Caribou.

I posted my advice on writing shapefiles last week.

Reading shapefiles is much easier overall. Just watch out for Rhino’s curious rules about invalid polylines:
https://developer.rhino3d.com/api/rhinocommon/rhino.geometry.polyline/isvalid

Do you need to read in “raster image” or “geotiff DEM” formats?

2 Likes

Oh yea Caribou is really cool! I forgot about that one

1 Like

You can also use Gismo grasshopper plugin.
One needs to define address (or latitude+longitude) and radius - Gismo will automatically generate the 2D and 3D geometry for that input.
For 3D, supported are buildings/structures, roads and trees:

Gismo installation:

And example file:

3 Likes

Wow, thanks for this. I likely won’t be using raster images or geotiffs right now.

I’m interested in creating generating maps to produce drawings and 3D site models.

Also, something to watch in coming months (hopefully) is the possibility to integrate Google Earth Photorealistic 3D Tile Data Sets into GIS applications.

In Google Developer they now have the Map Tiles API and you can integrate that with Cesium.js, Unreal Engine, and Unity.

I tested in UE and it works great and I did manage to export it to Rhino via .fbx but it was a fairly laborious process.

Perhaps a smart forum user or Rhino/GH developer can see if there’s a way to access the tile data from Rhino/GH as, in my opinion, its a great solution to get 3D site context for animation, rendering, and even more accurate view studies and such (within reason).

Combined with “hard lines” data like OSM it could be a really great workflow addition.

If you want to read more:

2 Likes

Yeah, I subscribed to a Geo-Tiles account when I was trying this with Blender. I’ll be curious to see how this develops.

1 Like