●Research Trends and Results

3D Landscape Simulation of Leveling Hills- New release of plug-in for visualizing changes of land shape KOBAYAHI Hideyuki, DR. Eng.
Research Coordinator for Housing Information System,
Research Center for Advanced Information Technology, NILIM(Key Words)
1. Background
Based on the latest version, 2.09, of the Landscape
Simulation System1) which was published March 14th,
2011, we developed a new plug-in (flow.dll) for
simulating change of landscape caused by leveling ofhills, which we released in December 16th, 2011.
After the Great East Japan Earthquake, theGeography Survey Institute elaborated lots of data,
which identify the areas inundated by the tsunami,
precise land shapes after the tectonic deformation (2mand 5m mesh DEM) and digital maps of objects whichclassify the buildings and infrastructure into 3 damagelevel categories. These accurate data, which are quite
useful for planning the reconstruction andrehabilitation, had been available only in themetropolitan areas before the disaster.

Shapes of a continuous bank or ditch can be alsomodeled by this plug-in, by defining the narrow andlong area to be leveled.
After testing this new plug-in by applying it toseveral actual land shape data, by normal andreasonable operations for modeling in a laboratory, it
was tested by unexpected operations performed byinnocent children who visited a festival held in ourinstitute (Nov.19).
However, they could easily understand how to
operate it to create flat land in a hilly area, and plottedhouses and facilities on the created land. Then aconventional ‘Walk-Through’ simulation or ‘Visible
Area Analysis’ was performed to check the views
from the created land open to the ocean, or views ofcreated slopes from the lower coastal land.

2. Usage of the plug-in to simulate Leveling of Hills
At first, users load the DEM data of the target area,
and convert them into the TIN model. On this land, thearea to be leveled will be defined through plotting thevertices of surrounding polygons in the orthogonalview. Also, the desired altitude of the area and gradingof cut & pile slopes can be numerically defined.
After clicking the ‘Execution’ button, the system
automatically calculates the cross-sections among land,slopes and created flat land, and shows it in the mainwindow. If the result is not acceptable, the user canthen cancel the operation and readjust the parameters
before executing the calculation again.

3. Usage, application and further improvements
The new plug-in has been freely available since Dec.
16th from our website2). Anyone can attach it to themain system which is also freeware. Along with the
publicly delivered land-shape data, community-level
usage at affordable cost will be promoted. Planners ordesigners can also utilize this to create and edit theprecise shape of a planned complex on sloping landconsisting of house-lots at different levels.
Further improvements will be carried out on thedata assimilation between e.g. accurate 3D data of a
housing complex and the surrounding rough land
shape. Also, volumes of cut and piled soil will be
estimated through geometrical calculation.
In other related research, Augmented Reality
viewing of the modeled 3D data on site, using thetablets was achieved by the end of February 2012.
The permanent preservation of 3D data of lost houses
or designed future plans, including un-adopted ideal
ones, is another target of our research3).
[Reference]
1) “The Architecture of Landscape Simulation
System Ver.2.09, provided by MLIT”
Research Report of NILIM No.42, March 14,
2011.
2) http://sim.nilim.go.jp/MCS/flow/flow1.asp3) http://sim.nilim.go.jp/MCS/phi/phi.asp

Figure 1. Example, elaborated by a child at afestival