To begin today’s lesson, we used Iowa Geo-data to gather data on a landscape that we are working on for another class. I have been working on a construction document for a proposed landscape for the southern corner of Reiman Gardens, so I chose this location. I found the Geo-data for Story County and downloaded it for use in ArcGIS Pro, which I then used to crop out the site for export into a DWG file. This was imported into Rhino, which gave accurate topography for the model at correct spacing and heights. 

At first I attempted to convert the topography into a surface by selecting the points of the curve, and then Patching it. This led to a rather warped model, so I was inclined to use Rhino Terrain. This made a much cleaner model that could be easily exported to scale as a 3DS file, which I then imported into Lumion (Note to self, always center model to coordinates 0,0,0). 

Once in Lumion, I converted the model into terrain, and molded it best I could to Lumion’s base. I then added foliage, mostly trees, into the model to reflect the site as it is. Lastly, I inserted fences that marked out the boundaries. I will need to eventually learn how to add in roadways, though I believe that will likely be done by projecting and overlaying a thin surface layer onto the topographic surface. Here is a poster of my process.