TERRA: Landscape Web App

Convert, Create and Analyze Landscape

Terra is a web app for students or landscapers who aim to understand or study an specific territory. You can convert, create and analyze all the terrains you want from a heightmap image.  We have used the plugin Bison to obtain quick and easy analyze landscape results.

Web App Tools

We developed Terra with diferent web tools:

  • HTML: to define input and output parameters that we will need for our web,
  • JAVASCRIPT: we will create the actions and process our web will compute or define, its our main brain in some way,
  • CSS: styling it to have a fancy and coherent design.
  • Rhino Compute: To compute grasshopper files inside the web app

Web App Workflow Use

How to use Terra?:

  1. Download heightmap .jpg of the site you are interesting on from the web:

    https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/

  2. Go to Terra Web App:

    https://bimsc22-landscapetest.herokuapp.com/examples/terra/02_index_convert_img.html#

  3. Upload Heightmap Image: Take the image you downloaded and upload it.
  4. Set Elevation Range: You should write the maximum and minimum height your heightmap has. You can see this information when you downloaded it tangram or you can invent it.
  5. Resolution: If you dont want to detail information or it goes slow, set the resolution you want, the bigger the lest detail the landscape terrain.
  6. Choose Analyze Type (choose from below which type of analyze you want to know and to visualize):
    • Terrain
    • Slope
    • Concavity
    • Elevation
    • Roughness
    • Shade
    • Orientation
    • Viewshed
    • Watershed
    • Optimize Location
  7. Set Slope Range: When we choose the analyze type “Slope” we can set the degrees that we are interested in investigating.
  8. Set Concavity Range: When we choose the analyze type “Concavity” we can set the percentage that we are interested in investigating.
  9. Set Roughness Range: When we choose the analyze type “Roughness” we can set the percentage that we are interested in investigating.
  10. Set Sunlight Direction: When we choose the analyze type “Shade” we can set the vector of the sunlight to know how is the shadeness.
  11. Set Orientation Range: When we choose the analyze type “Orientation” we can set the percetage that we are interested in investigating.
  12. For “Terrain” and “Elevation” we only can visualize it.
  13. For “Viewshed” and “Watershed” we can move the point we have so that we can investigate specific and diferent locations over the terrain.
  14. The text number bars that appears tells us the 10 highest and the 10 lowest data we have for that type of analyze.
  15. Finally the “Optimize Location“: if you set the ranges that we talked before thinking on where to locate your project, this type will tell you where are the best places to settle it.
  16. You can download all the landscape visualizations as 3D meshes and curves.

Video explaining the web app functions:

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TERRA: Landscape Web App is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master of Advanced Computation in Architecture and Design 2021/22 by Students: Jacinto Moros Faculty: David Andres Leon and Hesham Shawqy