Site modeling || Elk | gismo | Meerkat | Ghowl | LB terrain etc

Grasshopper
1

Hi guys,

I’ve been searching and testing pluggins alot (meerkat, elk, gismo, terrain generator (LB), Ghowl) on how to create a site that automatically models itself in grasshopper close as what we have acces in Google earth pro. And then, I could perform urban bioclimatic analysis with ladybug.

The goal is to create into grasshopper/rhino:

  • An high resolution topography with texture mapped on. (1m contour curve at least, or something similar)
  • 3D buildings with correct height according to topography
  • Trees as simple boxes
  • Roads to project on topo

The Main problem is where to get accurate information to model the site. OSM files (openstreetmap) are often incomplete (except in big cities); Shapefile (.shx, .dft, .shp) are difficult to find with all the information you want (especially buildings heights).

Should I look at other file format more accurate ? I’m thinking of :

Do you know more about other plugins in Grasshopper which can handle these files formats ?
Is there another way to get around this ‘‘lake of information’’ issue ?

Do you have any food for thoughts / links so I can keep exploring this subject ?!!

Really appreciate :wink: !
C.C

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Search for some WMS or WFS, data by a goverment provider in your location, if your in USA landsat8 or Aster is good enough(Heightmap), OSM (varies depending on location to) is good for determining streets Centerlines but you will need the property boundaries this can only be acquire with the local agencies. You can use Qgis there is a big collection of maps you can use, personally I would classified the data of the shapefiles depending on the UTM or MGRS an access the data on separated files, normally when you load a OSM map it loads over the RAM an unless you have a very big RAM your gonna have problems with memory on decently big cities, there better grids than UTM… similar to the ones google maps uses.For Regular size countries you would need a good memory management or LOD.

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OSM usually has the most complete base data… I’ve found that if OSM doesn’t have good coverage of a town, usually the town doesn’t have any GIS either. Finding a good, complete dataset is quite a challenge. If I want to create a site model, usually I download the OSM data and load it into OSM2World and export an obj to Rhino.

There is also Heron for GIS data into GH/Rhino.

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