Detroit Visualization

Site planning for security at large-scale gatherings such as political conventions and sporting events requires situation assessment through accurate representation of the spatial organization of the venue. The rapid construction of high fidelity 3D environments for site modeling and planning is a key capability of TerraTools. Coupled with the TerraTours® interactive viewer, an unlimited variety of collateral data can be spatially linked to the visualization.

The Detroit database covers a 7 km x 9 km area centered around downtown Detroit's Ford Field. An orthophoto with 2-foot spacing covers the inset area, defined by the highways around downtown Detroit, while the rest of the database is covered with textures downsampled from the original imagery. Detroit municipal GIS was used to automatically extrude building shapes with geotypical textures. Nine key buildings have photospecific side textures and aerial photography was applied to building rooftops. Street light and parking lot models were placed near Ford Field.

The 3D model of Ford Field was derived in 3DStudioMAX from architectural drawing files. The full 3D building model was exported using the TerraTools plug-in for MAX. The interior of the stadium includes photospecific texturing for the interior geometry of seating areas, section numbers, and walkways around the seating areas. The resulting TerraTools visualization includes 3D descriptive labels, still photography, and videos for each of the gates at Ford Field. Each of the parking lots, major roads leading to the stadium, and all landmark buildings have web links or ground photos for interactive query.

Click here to see a fly-through of the Detroit database.

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