To learn how the tridicon™ CityDiscoverer software represents vegetation, first read the web page tridicon™ CityDiscoverer Implementation Vegetation. The following assumes that you are familiar with the terminology.
CityBuilder can import vegetation data from these formats:
- ESRI Shape files (.shp)
- USGS LULC (Land Use / Land Cover, usual file extension is .gir)
There are several type of Vegetation Data.
- Biotype - polygonal areas which describe which biotype is found in that area.
- Density - polygonal areas which contain information (0 to 1) about how dense the vegetation is.
- Explicit - a set of actual plant instances.
Currently you can:
- Import Biotype from Shapefiles.
- Import Density from LULC and Shapefiles.
- Read and write Explicit instances with VF files, which can also be read by tridicon™ CityDiscoverer CityDiscoverer
Before doing any operations with vegetation,
- Make sure that you have a species file with the species you need. An example file is is
tridicon™ CityDiscoverer/CityDiscoverer/Data/PlantData/species.xml
- Load your species file with the menu command "Vegetation: Species List".
If you have point data for each plant, use these steps to import explicit plant instances:
- Use the menu command "Layer: Import Data" and indicate Vegetation.
- Indicate the file which contains the point locations of your instances. Generally this is a SHP file.
- Save the resulting layer to a VF file, which can be used by CityDiscoverer.
If you have an area covered by a single plant species, use these steps to generate a vegetation distribution:
- Use the Area Tool to indicate the area in which to distribute the vegetation
- Give the menu command "Area Tool - Generate Vegetation" A dialog will ask for :
- Grid Spacing of Sampling, in meters. The distribution will occur on a regular grid. At each point, it will test to see what kind of plant belongs at that location, given all known inputs. Then, if a plant is generated, a small random offset is applied to avoid the "regular" look of an evenly distribution.
- Artificial Scarcity. Most interactive simulation can't handle the full density of real-world vegetation. You can set this to a value less than 1 to produce an artificially scarce distribution. For example, 0.001 will produce 1/1000 of the normal density of vegetation.
- The resulting VF file can be used by CityDiscoverer.
If you instead have polygon data which described the general area covered by a number of plants, use these steps to generate a vegetation distribution:
- Load your Bioregion (list of Biotypes) with the menu command "Vegetation: BioRegions".
An example file is inData/PlantData/bioregion.txt
The plant densities are in plants per square meter.
- Import at least one vegetation layer with Biotype. Biotype is by 0-based index, so a integer field with values of 0, 1, 2, 3 etc. indicates which biotype.
- If you also (optionally) have polygon data with additional information about plant density, import that layer as Density. This can be the same GIS file that contains the Biotype, or a separate file such as a LULC file. If you don't have a data file, the default of "Normal Density" will be assumed.
- Use the Area Tool to indicate the area in which to distribute the vegetation
- Give the menu command "Area Tool - Generate Vegetation" A dialog will ask for :
- Grid Spacing of Sampling, in meters. The distribution will occur on a regular grid. At each point, it will test to see what kind of plant belongs at that location, given all known inputs. Then, if a plant is generated, a small random offset is applied to avoid the "regular" look of an gridded distribution.
- Artificial Scarcity. Most interactive simulation can't handle the full density of real-world vegetation. You can set this to a value less than 1 to produce an artificially scarce distribution. For example, 0.001 will produce 1/1000 of the normal density of vegetation.
- A VF file will be produced. You can load this file back into CityBuilder to check for correct distribution, or you can load it into CityDiscoverer for 3D visualization.