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2009-06-07

Orange County Great Park - 3D GIS Interactive Model


The final design of the Orange County Great Park has been approved providing a wide array of active and passive uses, including a 2.5 mile canyon and lake, miles of walking and biking trails, a cultural terrace, Orange County's largest sports park, a botanical garden, and a tethered helium observation balloon that will be an icon for the Great Park. More than 3,885 of the 4,700 acres will be dedicated to open space, education, and other public uses. Fuscoe Engineering provided an Interactive 3D GIS system controlled by a 3D mouse at the reception of the final presentation by the design team.

The model was built by compiling each of the design team disciplines' plans into GIS software. Over 20,000 3D trees were shown in real-time along with the grading plan, architecture, and surrounding terrain.

The system gave the public a chance to experience the future park virtually and understand it's size and scope. The video above detailing fly-over of the park was also shown during the final presentation by the design team. An interesting and perhaps rare example of the use of 3D GIS for design, decision making, communication and public outreach.

For more information see www.fuscoe.com

4 comments:

  1. do you know which software they used? I'm particularly interested how they were able to cope with 20.000 3D trees.

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  2. @olaf
    if you look closely at the video you see that the trees are billboards, not real 3d.
    So that shouldn't be to hard on the system

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:48 PM

    That's a SketchUp Model and animation, using Google Erath and a scanned color plan as a background.
    SketchUp animatons are easy to spot because of the "sharp turns" between camera transitions

    ReplyDelete
  4. thanks a lot! It's still surprising that GoogleEarth works smoothly with 20.000 billboards. I did quite some testing with large Sketchup models in GoogleEarth and even on a high-end computer, I reached the limit for billboard trees pretty soon.

    ReplyDelete