Workflows for real terrain and extruded GIS?

Hello, my collaborator has GIS shapefiles of buildings. He wants a world that has real terrain (its an actual place in the world) and also have the shapefile buildings extruded into 3d (have height). The shapefiles need to line up with the terrain (be in the same coordinate system).

Anyone have a workflow and or plugin recommendations that could help with this?

Best,
-Dave

 

Hi Dave

Good question. I'm new to Unity as well and I've just started to work for at small town in Denmark, that wants to use Unity to show their town model in Unity. Being able to insert forthcoming project and show it real-time to politicians to make decisions. Quite interesting.

Since I'm the one who is going to do it - it has been a hard learning curve. But here is what I've managed to do so far - there are still some problems that I'm working on.

We have a simple town model made in Arcgis Pro that is generated based on LAZ data of the area. The same goes for the height model of the area.

I've managed to split everything up into 2x2 km patches in Arcgis Pro and export each patch of terrain data as GEOTIFF images. These GEOTIFF images can be converted to .RAW files using "gdal_translate" In this way I can control the raw output to have the same minimum and maximum height, so all patches will have the same height value in Unity. The only downside so far is that each patch can have a slightly difference value around the edges and needs to be merged together which I still haven't figured out how to do. (but it looks like the new terrain module can do this)

From the same base model in Arcgis Pro I exported the buildings to a DWG file and converted this to an FBX in 3DS MAX. (Also patched bad geometry and add UVW maps to each building) I moved the model in 3ds max to 0,0,0 to be able to work with the geometry. (This is one of the downsides of 3ds Max - it cannot work with stuff if it is too far away for 0,0,0)

In Unity I created a terrain patch for each of the 2x2 km patches and put them next to each other. I also exported a JPG of our local map for each patch. Then I could import the FBX of the buildings and move them to fit the underlying map. Everything lined up perfectly with the heights of the buildings.

Hope this helps - I could really use some feedback on my process, since I feel like I'm working in the dark and there is not a lot of help to be found on the internet

 

1+ for this.

 

Yes, it would be great if we could use geotiff instead of raw files for importing heightmaps. Having to run through gdal to convert them is a pain.