Constructing 3D site models.

I am currently going through some of the introductory aspects of site planning. The process has shown how useful it is to create a 3D model in order to gain some insight into the scale of an area and its surroundings.

As an exercise I am studying the area at 11th and Market, which is currently the site of the proposed East Market development currently under construction:

I quickly took the building footprints layer and through a series of steps exported the layers from GIS to Sketchup. I then just extruded the layers up to the total building heights. Sketchup is pretty amazing and with a little more time, you can really make some great 3D renderings of a concept. This model was a quick, simple example to create a sense of scale for the area. (For city hall, I went ahead and grabbed a previously built model, that had some finer details of the building from Sketchup's model warehouse and scale it into this model.)

In addition to the 3D model that you can zoom in and view, I also placed the building footprints into Auto CAD, and laid out a template to send to our laser cutter. A number of layers were set up to score the building footprints in the base, and also cut out a number of layers of the footprints themselves to glue and stack on one another.  Pictured below are a few photos of the before and after process of creating the model from 1/16" chipboard.