Tell a Better Visual Story Using Heights and Themes for Land Value

How would your client react if you showed them something like this instead of a 2D map or excel table?

Let’s say I’m working on an exhibit for a road realignment proposal. I need my client to understand how much it will cost to acquire parcels for right of way. I have a shapefile of the parcels from the county. They might have an assessed value already assigned in your county, but for mine, I used Map 3D tools to add a new object data field of “Land_Value”. For my example, I just did values in the thousands (i.e. $250,000 = 250). Then, I exported the polygons as SDF and imported them into Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler.

When I configure the data, I’m going to tell Infrastructure Modeler to make these polyons into buildings. Yes, buildings!

I’ll grab that Land_Value data for the description field, as well as for the Roof Height. This will make my “buildings” the same height as the Land_Value. More expensive parcels will be taller than less expensive parcels.

It probably doesn’t make sense to have my “building” be 250m tall, so I can play around with that height either by changing the units or…

I can make a formula. I just want something that conveys the message and shows the relationship between land values. I’m not going to be measuring the heights or anything, so I’ll use Land_Value / 4.

I want the building bottoms to be draped on my terrain.

I didn’t assign a style yet, because I want to use that same theming technique that we learned the other day to assign colors based on that Land_Value field.

I also want to assign a tooltip to each building, like we did the other day for land use types. This will let me hover over one of my building/parcels and see the actual land value. We learned tooltips the other day in this post.

One the data refreshes, I see my parcels as 3D “buildings” with variable heights.

Hovering over a building, I get my tooltip.

Just like the other day, I can make a theme for these parcels. The red ones would be the most expensive.

What else can you use this technique for? How about:

Traffic counts

Air pollution

Lighting or sound impacts

Highly sensitive habitats or wetlands

Anything that you want to “pop” and have your stakehold say “OOOOh, now I see which parts we need to avoid!”

Comments

[Mad Marv]

Dana, this is a great hack for using AIM, I'm bookmarking this. I don't know when I'll get to use it, but I'm sure I will down the line.

[Tony]

Great Post. I have been playing around with AIM more and more and just loving it. It's so user friendly which I love.