Making 3D landscape and city models with Aerialod

This is my second post on Aerialod - the interactive path tracing renderer for height maps, by @ephtracy. It's available in 32 and 64-bit versions on Windows and it's super-lightweight but you can do some really amazing things with it. My previous post covers more of the basics, including controls and interface settings, so here I'll share some more information on how to tweak the settings (of which there are many) to create nice looking vistas. But as a quick reminder, hold down your right mouse button to rotate the map and use the space bar plus the left mouse button to move it around. Scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Keyboard shortcuts are here.

First I'll show you some new visuals I created in Aerialod, then I'll show you some of the settings I used to create them - in screenshots and in a small slide set. All the images I've posted below are in a shared folder, as well as a sample Lidar dataset for Cheddar Gorge in England that you can just drop in to Aerialod and then tweak the settings as you wish. You can of course create these kinds of images in other software (notably Blender) but Aerialod is much easier to use, though can be confusing at first.

Update (3 Nov 2020): here's an alternative shared folder on Dropbox, just in case either one is blocked where you are. The Dropbox folder is the best one to use though. I've left the other one above online as an archive.

So, let's begin with the highest peaks in Scotland, England and Wales, plus one other view that I like.

I did this using a 5m DTM (not open data)

See the curved horizon? - that's the SG lens setting

A very nice looking mountain

I've added Glen Etive because it's so lovely

But of course we don't always have to map things like mountains. If we have good quality Lidar data, as we do in much of the UK, we can create quite interesting cityscapes, as you can see below.

Here's a little Salford Sunset to get things rolling

A Newcastle-Gateshead vista, along the Tyne

The example data I've put in the shared folder is of Cheddar Gorge in the south west of England, and it looks like this once you fiddle with a few settings.

Sun low in the sky, dusky effect

I've tweaked some of the settings here to make it glow

Different angle, light filtering through the gorge

A foggier, early morning effect

So how do you do all this?
If you've not used Aerialod before then you'll really need to read my first blog post on it in order to get to grips with the controls, etc. Once you've done this, look closely at the screenshots below as the settings in them show you how I achieved the effects in the four images above. Study them closely and then see further below for a short slide set with more annotation on the settings options in Aerialod.

Take some time to Google some of the different terms and they'll begin to make a lot more sense - e.g. the Rayleigh setting refers to Rayleigh scattering, which relates to the blue colour we see in the sky. So, using the default Rayleigh setting in Aerialod you'll see a blue sky but if you reduce the number to, say 10, it will become more blue and if you put it up to 90, for example, it will look a lot less blue and instead more like a lovely glowing orange/yellow sunset. 

This relates to the first Cheddar Gorge image

This also relates to the first image

Notice the glowing light at the corners here

This is the fourth Cheddar Gorge image above

In addition to reading this, it's a good idea to check out the @ephtracy Twitter account for other tips, plus the #aerialod hashtag on Twitter. There are also now a few good video tutorials online, including this one by Steven Scott.

Here is the small set of slides, with annotated screenshots, that I made in order to help you get to grips with the settings a little better - direct link here.

All this, including the data, can be found in the Aerialod tutorial folder I made for this short blog post. Just drag and drop the .asc file I provided into Aerialod and start playing around.

I've put everything in here

The information above should be all you need to create more realistic, impressive 3D landscape or city models. It all depends of course upon being able to get good quality data at a high resolution - I've provided an example in the folder, but you can get a lot more on the Defra Lidar download page for England. You can use the OpenDem searcher to find suitable data for other parts of the world.

To end, I'm just going to post a few more images that I haven't shared anywhere else before, before a few final comments.

This is done by keeping the 'Map' option on in Grid settings

In the example above, I have all the options on in the Grid settings (Map, Ground, Vertical) and then I have used a value in the 'Step' settings on the right to match the resolution of the underlying data (in this case 5 metres) so that I get a blocky kind of effect - see below.

This works if you want to Minecraft your map

The Western Highlands of Scotland

In the image above, I just used a 1:50,000 Land-Form dataset shared by Carol Blackwood to render the Western Highlands of Scotland - I added the labels using GIMP. You can get the individual tiles as open data from Ordnance Survey as well (OS Terrain 50).

This city is home to two football teams, as you can see here

In the example above, I've just taken some Lidar open data of Liverpool and created a view looking down on Anfield and Goodison - home to Liverpool and Everton respectively. They are very close together and the densely packed terraced housing nearby also makes for an interesting example use case with this kind of data.

And, last but not least, St Kilda - a very wild and remote archipelago off the Western Isles of Scotland that is now a World Heritage Site.

In this example, I've added some fog

Notes: you can add a single file to Aerialod (it can handle PNG, JPG, TIF, IMG and ASC formats) or you can add multiple files at once using the little button on the top right that looks like a folder. That is covered in my previous blog post. If you try to load humongousbytes of data then it may crash. Sometimes it won't crash but just won't load. Generally I find it just works and the Scotland 1:50,000 terrain model above is over 600MB and worked fine for me. Just remember that when you hover over any of the tools in Aerialod you will get information on what it is and what it does at the bottom of the window. 

Citation: Blackwood, Carol. (2017). Scotland Land-Form PANORAMA® DTM, [Dataset]. EDINA. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/1929.

A Land Cover Atlas of the UK

This blog post provides a bit more detail and background information about my new publication A Land Cover Atlas of the United Kingdom. It's basically a 23 page pdf accompanied by a set of 392 maps of land cover - one for each local authority in the UK, plus an overview map of the whole UK. The publication date kept getting pushed back because I was also working with the BBC on the topic and we wanted to ensure things went online at the same time. I have once again chosen Figshare to host this as it's an excellent platform for dissemination of this type of data. The Atlas uses Corine Land Cover 2012 data and was the result of a spare time summer project that I recently finished. See below for an example of one of the local authority maps, from Tonbridge and Malling in Kent, in the South East of England.

Tonbridge and Malling - a fairly fruity landscape

There are plenty of other land cover maps, and this is not new data, but I wanted to show what it looks like at the local level in a set of static maps and I hadn't seen it presented like that before; so it's kind of a new take on existing data. I did this partly because I wanted to be able to understand how areas differ but also because I wanted a better idea of the diversity of land cover at the local level across the UK in a way that was easy to digest. That's what I've attempted here. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if it works, but I quite like the results as it give me a better understanding of land cover nationwide.

The rest of this post just provides a little bit more background detail to the Atlas project itself and some of the decisions I made in producing it, including a few pictures.

First of all, I wanted this to cover the whole UK. I thought it would be interesting to be able compare all 391 local authorities in terms of their land cover. It's always a bit annoying when you see some great data but your part of the country isn't included! The Corine classification has a total of 44 land use classes but since it covers the whole of Europe there are some categories that don't appear in the UK - such as Glaciers. This leaves a total of 39, though some of these 'land cover' categories are actually water. 

Anyway, each map legend lists all possible land cover categories so that you can easily compare places and the proportion of different land types in them. I thought it was also important to be able to identify what land cover types areas don't have, that's why you'll see a legend entry for a category even if it doesn't appear on the map.

I also wanted the project to be based on open data and open source software, so I used Corine (open), Ordnance Survey data (open), Source Sans Pro font (open) and QGIS (free, open source). See the images below for a bit more on this kind of thing.

Not that it really matters, but I do like an open font

This map extract is from the Angus council area in Scotland

This was a spare time project that got out of hand

The full resolution maps are quite big - see permanent link 

I also wanted to show what land cover areas do not contain

Values <1% are shown in light font

Scale is always shown, but areas differ hugely in size

Some slight boundary line mismatches - later maps will have a fix

This all started with me wanting to investigate what percent of the UK is 'urban' and how much is 'golf course' using the new OS greenspace data. I got to the bottom of the latter but in relation to the former it really does depend upon how you measure it. I don't believe there is a definitive answer but if I was pressed, I'd always say less than 10%. Corine data suggests it is about 6%. 

Take a look at the Atlas document itself if you're interested - and then check out the map for your area. You can also see more about this in a related BBC story, for which I produced a set of simplified Corine maps that are much easier to digest because they only show four categories.

In the BBC piece, I also decided to show building footprints, as a way to add a little more detail and legibility to the maps. This meant I had to create a set of files with all UK buildings in it. For Great Britain this was pretty time consuming, but straightforward. For Northern Ireland I had to create it using open data. But the end result was quite satisfying and after a bit of to-and-fro with Tom Armitage from Digimap to confirm my figures I was ready to go. As it happens, the total area of the UK covered by buildings amounts to about 1.3%. In Great Britain overall it's about 1.4%, which is much higher than, say, the land covered by golf courses: 0.54%. I have also calculated these figures at local authority level, but that's one for another day.

Mind you, if you are stuck for something to say during a lull in conversation, you might want to interject with "I say, did you know that Islington is 30% building, and that Birmingham and Manchester are both 15% building?".

Notes: I have done my best to map this as accurately and clearly as possible. If you do spot any mistakes, please feel free to get in touch. Like I said above, there are other methods for mapping land cover and there are other data sources so don't take this as the definitive account. Having said this, I think it provides a good overview of land cover in the UK at a local level. There are some further notes on these kinds of things in my Atlas document, on page 3. The Appendices also contain data tables on land cover for each part of the UK.