Ok, your average terrain-only based viewshed (view is from a road to the southeast, viewshed is in cyan): Note that based on these estimates, we should be able to see most of the valley walls from this little slice of road.  I don’t buy that.  That section of road is pretty closed in with trees.  Let’s add them: As you may see, just a little … Continue reading Povray Viewshed with Trees (finally) (cont.)

Povray Viewshed with Trees: if we cannot yet have veracity, at least may we have verisimilitude. Continue reading Povray Viewshed with Trees (finally)

Just a short teaser post until I remember to bring the code home with me, but I’ve placed trees within the bounds of a canopy layer determined from some county LiDAR dataset.  The tree locations, heights, and rotation are set using pseudo-random numbers, which looks a lot better than a monoculture of the same tree.  Eventually, estimating stem locations and canopy heights to do this … Continue reading Povray Landscape with Trees

In some of my first posts, I discussed the possibility of using povray for viewshed analyses, since it is a more flexible tool, and can better handle complex analyses, like terrain + vegetation, something which most GIS tools cannot.  In the end though, I just produced a simple terrain based viewshed analysis.  Now, I’m getting ready to go deeper.  Now, I’m ready to put some … Continue reading POV-Ray for viewsheds (with trees?)

global_settings { max_trace_level 1 } #include “shapes.inc” #include “colors.inc” #include “textures.inc” height_field { png “c:\temp\povray\n2225625.png” // 16-bit integer digital elevation water_level 0.0 texture { pigment { image_map { png “C:\temp\povray\n2225625_drape.png” map_type 0 interpolate 2 once }  // Aerial rotate x*90 } } scale <5000, 65536, 5000>  // Scale to real world size translate <2224868,0,625008>  // Translate to location in Ohio state plane } /// Orthographic … Continue reading POV-Ray for viewsheds code