more fiddling with Blender and GIS

Posted by Gus Koehler on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/more-fiddling-with-Blender-and-GIS-tp521259p521276.html

Here is a text that you might find interesting summarizing some aspects of
the approach suggested in my earlier post.

http://www.csiss.org/best-practices/siss/

Gus

Gus Koehler, Ph.D.
Principal
Time Structures
1545 University Ave.
Sacramento, CA 95825
916-564-8683, Fax: [phone]
Cell: 916-716-1740
www.timestructures.com
 


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 4:17 AM
To: Friam
Subject: [FRIAM] more fiddling with Blender and GIS


We're preparing for a project that will be an agent-based model of wildfire
evacuation planning in Santa Fe -- Primarily a wildfire model coupled to a
traffic model with agents embedded in a social network deciding whether they
should stay in their houses or evacuate.

I'm putting Blender (http://www.blender3d.org) through its paces to see if
we can use it for the visualization (and possibly portions of the agent
and/or fire modeling).

Tonight, I tried importing Digital Elevation Models (DEM) for Los Alamos and
Santa Fe directly into Blender. Below is a Quicktime that displays 2 square
degrees between latitude 35-36N and longitude 105-107W. The movie starts in
the southwest corner (35N107W) and moves up to the northwest over the Valle
Caldera near LANL (35.5N106.5W) and then over to Santa Fe. It ends roughly
just north of Santa Fe Ski Basins looking down toward Albuquerque.
http://www.redfish.com/projects/SFWildfire/SantaFe_DEM_SRTM.mov

I used DEM files of type SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) from an FTP
directory at NASA (ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/)

I found a SRTM conversion script on the Blender Elysiun forum. The script is
very nicely packaged with a site, *great* documentation and a GUI in
Blender. The site is here:
http://uaraus.altervista.org/index.php?filename=en/content/categories/Blende
r/DE
M_importer.html. There's other scripts available to deal with other formats.

The documentation below is worth reading for more detail and it graphically
explains the data format of the SRTM file:
http://www.redfish.com/projects/SFWildfire/DEM_importer_eng_0.0.4.pdf


-Steve






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