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visualisation and visibility
photomontages created from 3D CAD models are a popular and powerful method of communicating your design proposals - it's a complex process which requires experience and expertise, not only in modelling 3D design proposals, terrain and photo-editing, but in understanding the scaling and matching perspective to photographs that make the final images stand up to scrutiny - for more information on this see: SNH: Visual Representation of Wind Farms - Good Practice Guidance demand for photomontages is usually as a result of planning requirements for a thorough landscape visual assessment, but technological advances mean that video montage and compositing techniques may become popular - but these are inherently labour intensive to produce and a more affordable intermediate stage is to animate a photomontage (which retains a still background) - the technique is particularly useful for wind farms in which the movement of the turbine is far more noticeable than a traditional photomontage would predict
a relatively new service we are providing for technical wind farm photomontage production, which is rapidly generating interest is to include animated turbines within the view - we are experts in creating verified computer predicted images for the planning process and environmental assessment - much of our work being for private landscape architecture firms, local authorities and wind farm developers If you're involved in visual assessment studies then you'll already know that a wind farm can look fairly innocuous from a distance, sometimes hard to spot on a photomontage - but even a small movement in the landscape draws the eye straight away, so it's helpful to have this information if you are to accurately predict visual impact; and even if you'd prefer not to draw attention to the wind farm, your opponents might
our technique is just one step on from producing traditionally verified views, and much more cost effective than video-montage and moving-camera video compositing. We'll create a project web site or video / DVD presentation for you to display animations delivering the results electronically the following computer generated imagery tehniques are available for visualising a wind farm for planning purposes: photomontages and verification - these are panoramic views created from a series of usually three or more site photographs. The computer predicted 3D perspective image of the wind farm is superimposed at the correct scale and position to match the camera type and location. This is verified by optical-digital scaling calculations and the use of GPS / reference coordinate information animated photomontages - the turbine blades rotate in the photomontage view. This helps to judge the quality of the impact in terms of the human perception. The animations are created in digital movie format and can be viewed either on screen over the internet or from a CD/DVD virtual reality fly-through - either wireframe style or terrain draped aerial photography can represent the landform in interactive computer imagery. A preset flight path can be run, such as following a highway or public footpath or, at any stage, the animation can be stopped and the camera is moved interactively in a new direction or to a new location using the keyboard or a joystick controller. Turbines can be colour coded or realistically represented, and animated of course 
ZVI - zones of
visual influence Mapping (sometimes also referred to as 'zones of theoretical visibility'
or 'predicted visibility'). The wind farm visibility in a wider context is
represented in plan form usually over a 10km or greater radius with shading to show either
the number of turbines seen or the proportion of turbine height it is possible to see from
that location on the map. Cumulative studies are carreid out in the same way
further
visual analysis studies, such
as line of sight enquiries of the 3D terrain model and automatic cross sections can also
be carried out by interrogating the 3D terrain model
some of our clients for
wind farm photomontage visualisations and visibility analyses (zvi / ztv) are listed below |
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