« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »
AU 2006
The Land Planning SIG luncheon is scheduled for Tuesday November 28 at Autodesk University. I will be reporting the results as well as the other planning related discussions which I hope to have next week in Las Vegas. Please look me up if you are going to be there.
I had a very interesting land planning conversation with an architect last week. She has been doing a lot of thinking about the need for a much more comprehensive approach to land planning. One that not only includes the integration of planning and civil/site, but also buildings, or perhaps more accurately BIM - building information modeling.
BIM is hot right now, and Autodesk's ADT and Revit are leading the way. Integrating large digital terrain models into Revit is not something that Revit was designed to handle, but the need is there, and Autodesk intends to address it. A comprehensive solution that would include the land planning function is also on the radar.
Hope to see you at AU.
November 20, 2006 in Planning | Permalink | Comments (0)
More on 3D and Planning
3D laser scanning, one of the more exciting surveying technologies to come on the scene in the past 20 years is starting to move out of the early adopter phase. Using the same LIDAR technology that I discussed in the 9/29 post, the use of terrestrial LIDAR is generally referred to as 3D laser scanning. The impact of this technology, from a pure surveying and mapping point of view, in the long run may be more important than GPS.
3D laser scanning produces what are called point clouds. These extremely dense sets of 3D points can produce detail to as fine as a few millimeters. Scans can produce millions to even billions of points. For land planning this may be overkill, but landscape architects will certainly benefit from the increased accuracy as well as the ability to "see" the site in 3D. This is perhaps more valuable than the millimeter accuracy.
But there's a catch - today's CAD engines were never designed to handle massive point clouds. Supporting these 3D datasets is going to be critical to the industry. In many cases today the 3D point clouds are being "dumbed" down to 2D because the CAD applications cannot support the 3D data.
If you are interested in laser scanning and have some ideas about how it will impact the planning profession please drop me a note.
November 14, 2006 in Planning | Permalink | Comments (0)
