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Geoinformatics-8-2009
article a software whose time has come landxplorer and designing digital cities what impact is autodesk s acquisition of landxplorer having on digital cities? by neil brooker over the past eighteen months or so, autodesk has announced it is working with three major global cities on pilot digital city schemes. he creation of cities which are safe, environmentally responsible, aesthetically pleasing and also pleasant and enjoyable to live in is one the great challenges of our time. but, while much of the world is becoming increasingly urbanised, other regions have seen a flight to the suburbs. this push and pull is intensifying and stretching our conurbations, turning them into great pools of humanity which develop in an organic yet haphazard way. at the same time the green agenda demands better and more energy-efficient buildings in neighbourhoods which nuture their residents and are built to last. increasingly government agencies and others require a fully-synthesised and holistic view of the structures within their city not just for the present, but also to support the entire lifecycle. because of this, visual images and fly-through simulations of cities in 3d environments made up of basic terrain models and block buildings have become commonplace. on a more professional level, a number of municipalities across europe have commissioned local surveys to develop urban 3d models for the primary aim of marketing and engaging citizens in planning decisions. however, these models are usually generated t as a result of one-off investment projects rather than maintained on a rolling basis. as a result, they represent snapshots in time and become rapidly out of date. increasingly, planners and other city stakeholders are looking for a way of not just visualising their city now and in the future, but also being able to integrate different types of data to give realtime, totally accurate information for better quality decision-making. milestone acquisition consequently, autodesk s timely acquisition of the german firm 3d geo last year marked a milestone in the whole issue of convergence and urban modelling. 3d geo s flagship product landxplorer was, of course, already wellknown to geospatial professionals and visualisation experts alike, not least as the software was used to produce a large-scale 3d model of the centre of berlin. the model, which contains over 40,000 buildings, can be explored on line through google earth. but, autodesk s interest reflects a consensus that the creation of digital cities is not just a one-off, experimental exercise. the software vendor s policy of democratising emerging technologies by pulling them out of their niche and making them available to all main- stream designers is well-known and it looks as though the user-friendly landxplorer will benefit from this treatment too. already, autodesk s data access technology, fdo, has been added to allow direct access to geospatial data, whether held in a file format such as shp or sdf, or a spatial database such as oracle spatial or mysql. this also means it can aggregate and visualise data from autocad, autocad map 3d, revit architecture, topobase and 3ds max. this means that users have the capability to integrate detailed bims with rich, data-centric 3d models to bring intelligence to what was before merely a picture. analytical queries can now be run and data interrogated at different scales, from a single room to an entire city in order to generate meaningful information. this can then be presented in a multitude of formats. this advance also brings a real flexibility in level of detail (lod) and an accuracy and precision not possible with other products on the market or indeed with google earth. in general, autocad map 3d can be used to create and manage geospatial data and also create and manage 3d block buildings (lod1) for the landxplorer city model. more complex building designs with a higher degree of rendering december 2009 6
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