Small Terrain Areas / DTM

When the terrain area is small and high-definition, such as an individual building site, there are specialized fields with their own software and approaches for dealing with this type of data.

"Digital Terrain Modeling" - DTM

• DTM is the name used for virtual terrain by professionals in civil engineering, surveying and construction
• common tasks for this application of virtual terrain include:
  • landscape planning, civil engineering, route planning, visual impact analysis, land surveying, sectioning, contouring, designing new surfaces or structures, calculating volumes, and comparing surfaces level differences
• some academic groups studying terrain from this perspective:
  • Digital Terrain Modelling Group at the University of Zurich
  • Precise Engineering & Deformation Surveys Group at the University Of Calgary
• many DTM programs for working with elevation over small areas are listed on the Elevation Contour Data page

Landscape Architecture

• increasingly, landscape architects are finding that terrain visualization is useful
• Center for Landscape Research at the University of Toronto
• Landscape Architecture department at the Harvard Design School
• Virtual Landscapes paper by Stephen Ervin (1997) led to his book:
  • Landscape Modeling: Digital Techniques for Landscape Visualization (2001)
• Terrain Modelling in Digital Landscape Design
  • A collection of tutorials for Autodesk Civil 3D, a package commonly used in this field
  • It calls the subject "LIM - Landscape Information Modelling as a response to BIM (Building IM) in Architecture".
• American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)

Landscape Architecture Software

• this field still hasn't made the leap to 3D virtual terrain
• Garden Graphic's DynaScape (2D only)
• PRO Landscape (mostly 2D)