CAD & Visualisation

Introduction

Course code : ENVT1023
Course co-ordinator : David Watson
Course weighting : 15 Credits

This course is in two halves. The first half (weeks 1 to 6) is about landscape design. The second half (weeks 7 to 12) is about landscape planning. The first half of the course consists of a single digital design project and will be undertaken in groups. This project is intended to be experimental and involve the innovative use of software. The second half consists of two projects, which are undertaken on an individual basis and focus on the professional techniques involved in visual impact assessment.

Aims and Outcomes

• To develop CAD teamwork techniques
• To demonstrate how 3D CAD models can be used as iterative design tools
• To demonstrate simple animated walkthroughs and narrative presentations
• To introduce students to paperless presentation methods
• To introduce Digital Terrain Modelling (DTM) & Zones of Visual Influence (ZVI)
• To demonstrate how to combine 3D CAD models and photographic images
• To introduce skills in photomontage and to produce "before and after" images

Format

The course runs during Term 1 and consists of three main elements - workshops, group projects and individual projects.

Workshops

The Course Schedule gives a general overview of the workshops and a suggested topic for each week. However, this is indicative and may change depending upon the requirements of students and project specifics. Tuition will be given on various aspects of digital design but as this is an advanced course, students will be expected to engage in some independent learning. The workshops are a weekly point of contact for students (many of whom are part-time) during the group project. They are also used for crit and feedback on project work. This is an advanced course and most work will need to be undertaken outside of the workshops.

Course Schedule

The course schedule gives an overview of the timetable, weekly topics and submission dates for this course. There may be occasional changes, so check back frequently.

* Teams to hand-in Urban Development project CD/DVD
† Hand-in ZVI project by file upload

All sessions are 3 hours long and take place on Friday mornings; beginning at 10.00am. Sessions will be taught in Tower Lab A unless otherwise indicated.
Attendance is not required for "Online" events.

Assessed Elements

This course includes 3 assessed elements; one group project and two individual projects. Details of these elements are given below. Each of the elements has a slightly different weighting and this is indicative of the degree of difficulty and/or the amount of work required. The weighting is as follows:

• Group Project: 50%
• ZVI Analysis Project: 25%
• Verified Photomontage Project: 25%

Details of each project are given below.

Group Project: Urban Development Project

Project Aim

This project is designed to develop 3D CAD skills, to develop team-working techniques, to introduce the iterative design process, to introduce animated walkthroughs and to introduce paperless methods of narrative presentation. The software used will be varied but may include AutoCAD, SketchUp, Bryce, Photoshop, PowerPoint, and/or others.

Project Overview

The group will be split into design teams of 5 or 6 students. As far as possible, each team will be balanced in terms of digital design skills so that no one team has a particular advantage. Each team will follow the same brief.

Project Brief

This year's project is being run by Tom Turner and you will find further details at his blog, an extract of which is given below.

London has had many economic roles over the centuries and now hopes to settle down as a cultural capital and somewhere between ‘Europe’s financial centre’ and ‘the world’s financial centre’. This requires a planning and design response which is likely to include
(1) more large green buildings, because big firms have big space requirements
(2) more homes for young, rich and mobile people
(3) more urban public space of the highest quality and greatest variety: busy and quiet, large and small, glazed and unglazed, soft and hard, wild and cultured, space at ground level, above ground and below ground, space for shopping and space for prayer, space with quiet water, bright water, dark water, swimming water, boating water and living water, biodiversity, socially diverse space for each cultural group (listeners to Radios 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 etc) and social space for the particular interests of ethnic, work and leisure groups.
London’s new amenities could be provided on a spatterdash basis – or London could have an urban landscape plan. The Canary Wharf development on the Isle of Dogs was a key project. It points to what should be done, to how it should be done – and to where it should be done. London’s traditional rival is Paris, which has a bold plan, now over 300 years old, for projecting the axis of the Tuileries westward – to the Place de la Concorde, to the Arc de Triomphe, to La Défense and beyond. London has a modest plan for projecting Crossrail into the Thames Gateway. But London landscape planning lacks spatial imagination – and axes were a baroque idea.
London will require many new buildings. They should be of the best available quality – and they should be grouped to ‘define and contain’ new urban space of the best quality and variety. The urban space should be designed before the buildings. A great new urban landscape should be planned to run east from the Isle of Dogs. Olympia and York made a significant start when they commissioned Laurie Olin to plan Westferry Circus and the Canary Wharf central axis. Before this, the Isle of Dogs was being developed with small cheap buildings and a pitiful lack of long-term vision. The Hanna Olin plan was much better – but it was more of a plan for Visual Space than for Social Space or Ecological Space. The present period of relative economic stagnation is an opportunity to take a broad perspective on the eastward projection of London and its financial future. There should be a 3-year plan, a 30-year plan and a 300-year plan.
London should remember that ‘He that the beautiful and useful blends, Simplicity with greatness, gains all ends’. Urban designers, architects and landscape architects should plan a multi-functional urban landscape with the highest visual quality and as much sustainability as can be planned at this point in time, with conceptual principles prioritised over design deails.

Google Map

Take a look at a map of the project area to get your bearings.

The Project

Society wants us to plan and design landscapes which are functional and ecological. That is why it gives us bread and butter. But society also has a soul. It wants beauty, poetry, imagination and dreams. The most inspirational planner of the twentieth century, who was also the first European to call himself a 'landscape architect', put it like this 'Our whole life is governed by ideals, good and bad, whether we know it or not. North, south, east and west are only ideals of direction: you will never absolutely get there; yet you can never get anywhere, save indeed straight down into a hole, without them'. (Patrick Geddes). For the CADViz course we ask you to concentrate on ideals, poetry, music, magic and dreams. To achieve their full potential, design projects must catch the imagination of clients, and make them glow with laughter and delight. Advertisers know this and some of the best film and animation work is commissioned for commercials.

The 2010 CADViz project is linked to the 2010 Urban Development Projects but you should not see the CADViz work as a presentation exercise for the UDP work and you are welcome to depart from the UDP design if you wish. The UDP work must be rooted in reality and must give its many clients reasons for wanting to implement the proposals. For CADViz you should aim to capture the hearts of viewers, not their minds or their wallets. However, you are of course very welcome to use some of the CADViz work in the final presentation of your UDP work, or you may wish to adapt and extend it for this purpose. The framework of looking 300 years back and 300 years forward lends itself to imaginative story-telling. You need a story board for the CADViz, as you do for the UDP, but it need not tell the same story.

Either the full project, or an excerpt from the project, must be published on the Greenwich Flickr group to help publicise the imagineering skills of the landscape architecture profession. For this reason, any music you use in the presentation should be open source music (or your own music). You may regret this restriction but as you will find in practice, the fees for using music with copyright restrictions can be very high. A web search on open source music will produce a great range of alternatives and you will also find many Myspace contributors allow their music to be used if it is credited to the artists. We don't want you to be sued, either now or when you are in practice.

The map above indicates the broad areas to be tackled by each group. As you can see, the area boundaries are not well defined - this is intentional. It is up to each group to decide upon a specific boundary for their design proposals or to assume that their design ideas will extend beyond the given areas. Whichever option is chosen, the group need only produce a design proposal for the area indicated.

Assessment Details

Although this is a "design" project, you should consider the design only as a vehicle for the investigation and development of method and process. The quality of design will be considered but it has a lower weight than other criteria. There are 3 main criteria for assessment and they are:

• Innovative use of software for design development and presentation
• Quality of the presentation and design
• The clarity with which the design narratives (method/process and pavillion) are told

2010 Results

Exceptional work this year - well done to all teams.

• Team 1: 77%
• Team 2: 75%
• Team 3: 74%
• Team 4: 71%
• Team 5: 76%
• Team 6: 73%

Zone of Visual Impact Project

Project Aim

To introduce students to the concepts and techniques of computer aided visual impact assessment and to demonstrate the design, implementation and presentation of a ZVI analysis using industry-standard software (AutoCAD, Key Terra-Firma and Photoshop).

Project Overview

This project is part theory and part practice. We will discuss the various computer techniques involved in visual impact assessment. You will be introduced to digital terrain modelling (DTM) and zone of visual influence (ZVI) techniques using Key TERRA-FIRMA. Students will complete a simple exercise based on a landscape scenario.

Project Brief: Mobile Phone Mast near the A3, north-east of Guildford

The mobile phone company "Phones-for-all", whose latest marketing gimmick, 25,000 different ring tones free with each phone, wish to erect an new 36m high mast near the A3(T) to the north-east of Guildford at grid reference 505080,155160.

Since the new mast is taller than 15m, Phones-for-all require planning permission before the mast can be erected. Since planning consent can only reasonably be refused on amenity grounds, they have been asked by the local planning authority to provide evidence of the visual impact of the mast. There is a lot of public opposition to the mast from residents of the villages nearby. The residents have formed a campaign against the mast and are also producing evidence of the visual impact of the proposed mast.

Landscape consultants have been appointed by each of the two opposing sides. Both ZVI studies are to be carried out with a radius of 4km but aside from this stipulation, the consultants may interpret the data and the ZVI results in any way they wish providing they are balanced and fair.

Instructions

For the purposes of this exercise, you will be asked to represent either Phones-for-all or the local residents campaign group. You may decide for yourself which of the two sides you will represent.

Complete a ZVI study using the data provided and the details above. The maps, statistics etc. can be presented using Microsoft Word or Powerpoint or any other suitable tool but the resulting document should be delivered as an Adobe PDF file. The presentation should also include a short written description of the visual influence of the proposed mobile phone mast.

Submission & Assessment

Assessment for this project will be in the form of an exercise which must be completed and the results submitted on or brfore the date given in the Course Schedule. Exercise results should be compiled as an Adobe PDF file and submitted by file upload. Work will be marked by the course tutor with marks being awarded for accuracy of the analysis, quality of presentation and the professionalism of the description of the results.

More information on ZVIs can be found here.
A ZVI help page is provided for this project.

Submission Details

This project should be submitted as a .PDF file (maximum file size 2.5MB) and uploaded to the coursestuff website on or before the day of submission. The file must be named using the following format: Student ID_zvi.pdf. For example, if your ID is ab123, your file will be ab123_zvi.pdf. Use the Coursework Submission page to upload your work for review and assessment. A maximum file size of 2.5MB is set for this submission but in most cases your file should only be a few hundred KB. Do make sure that all images used are correctly compressed for screen resolution - this will help keep file sizes down. Please ensure that your name is clearly shown on all submitted work.

Verified Photomontage Project

Project Aim

To introduce students to the concepts and techniques involved in producing realistic, verified photomontages of proposed developments and to demonstrate the use of field techniques and software tools (AutoCAD and Photoshop) for photomontage.

Project Overview

Students will be given the details of a fictitious development and asked to produce a number of photomontages, taken from known locations. This will allow students to put into practice the techniques demonstrated in the workshops. Specific project details will be provided when the project is introduced.

Project Brief

Create a verified photomontage massing study (not a detailed render) from 2 viewpoints using the given materials in the Photomontage Data.zip file.

Submission & Assessment

Assessment for this project will be based on the final photomontage images. Work submitted must include both before and after views from each photographic location. The presentation can be compiled using Microsoft PowerPoint or any suitable software but the work must be submitted as an Adobe PDF file. Work must be submitted on or before the date given in the Course Diary by file upload (details below) and will be marked by the course tutor with marks being awarded for quality of presentation and accuracy of results.

More information on verified photomontages can be found here.

Submission Details

This project should be submitted as a .PDF file (maximum file size 2.5MB) and uploaded to the coursestuff website on or before the day of submission. The file must be named using the following format: Student ID_photomontage.pdf. For example, if your ID is ab123, your file will be ab123_photomontage.pdf. Use the Coursework Submission page to upload your work for review and assessment. A maximum file size of 2.5MB is set for this submission but in most cases your file should only be a few hundred KB. Do make sure that all images used are correctly compressed for screen resolution - this will help keep file sizes down. Please ensure that your name is clearly shown on all submitted work.

Course Documents

These documents contain all the information about the course, projects, briefs and tutorials. All documents are provided in PDF format. Some documents may also be provided in appropriate alternative formats. In order to view the PDF files, you will need the Adobe Reader.

There are currently 3 files in this section

File Listing

	Filename	Size (KB)	Date Modified
	Design Project Teams 2009-10.pdf	59.4	2nd Mar 2011
	ENVT1023 Course Brief 09-10.pdf	59.7	2nd Mar 2011
	Tiananmen Project Mark Sheet.pdf	16.3	2nd Mar 2011

Reference Documents

These documents are useful references.

There are currently 0 files in this section

Course Materials

The files in this section contain the source materials for the various projects.

To download AutoCAD drawing files, right-click on the file link and select "Save Target As…"

There are currently 0 files in this section

Key Texts

• Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (2nd Edition) by The Landscape Institute and the Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment
• Visual Representation of Windfarms: Good Practice Guidance published by Scottish Natural Heritage

Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (2nd Edition)

The second edition of this book was published in 2002 and incorporates changes needed after changes in the statutory framework for Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Statements within the European Union. EU Council Directive 97/1/EC was implemented in England and Wales by the Town and Country Planning (England and Wales)(Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations in 1999 and in Scotland by the Environmental Impact Assessment (Scotland) Regulations, also in 1999.

The book is divided into nine parts. The first three focus on general principles of good practice, a background to the EIA process, the methodology of analysis and planning policy context. Parts four to nine fall into a logical sequence that clearly illustrates the practical application of the various processes and recommended methods. A number of these sections are illustrated with relevant case studies. The book is rounded off with an invaluable glossary and 10 appendices of which, Appendix 6 is worth special note. This appendix contains five examples of threshold criteria for visual impact as used by practitioners. This is an excellent source of information for those who have never before been involved with a visual impact survey and it gives an important insight into the methodology adopted by well respected practitioners.

The GLVIA is a well thought out, logically presented and superbly illustrated. This is essential reading for all consultants involved with landscape and visual impact assessment and should be required reading for all developers. The book is published by Spon and is also available from Amazon.co.uk. It is also available as an eBook through MyiLibrary, accessible via the Student Portal.

Avery Hill Library copies: 4

Visual Representation of Windfarms: Good Practice Guidance

This publication should be a standard text in any landscape office engaged in visual impact assessment. Although it is specifically written as advice for practitioners engaged in VIA projects involving windfarms, much of the content is also relevant to more general VIA projects. In some respects, this book plugs some of the gaps in the GLVIA. That book is rather short on technical detail. This book provides that in spades. An excerpt of the book is available as a PDF for download.

Visual Representation of Windfarms: Good Practice Guidance is available from Scottish Natural Heritage.

Avery Hill Library copies: 1 study loan

Helpers

Animation with Scenes in SketchUp

Animation with AutoCAD

This tutorial demonstrates how to create a short "walk-through" animation with AutoCAD 2011.

You can download the Small Town.dwg file if you'd like to follow this tutorial.

Tutorials

• Creating a 3D grid from designed contours using Key TERRA-FIRMA and AutoCAD
• Moving your ZVI map from AutoCAD to Photoshop
• Photo-matching with AutoCAD & Photoshop (part 1 - 9min 2sec) - Adding view points, control points and cameras in AutoCAD and creating a perspective from the viewpoint.
• Photo-matching with AutoCAD & Photoshop (part 2 - 8min 6sec) - Moving the wireframe model to Photoshop and photo-matching with the control points.
• Photo-matching with AutoCAD & Photoshop (part 3 - 12min 3sec) - Rendering the model in AutoCAD and finishing in Photoshop with a layer mask.

Software Toolkit

• AutoCAD - Autodesk Student Community for free software more…
• Paint.NET - Paint.NET is a great free alternative to Adobe Photoshop.
• Google SketchUp - Google SketchUp is a free version of this excellent 3D design tool.
• InterpOSe - Free download of the translator for OS MasterMap to DWG from Dotted Eyes.

Online Resources

• AutoCAD - The official website for the UK
• CADTutor - Tutorials, articles and resources for AutoCAD
• My CAD Site - Tutorials for AutoCAD
• Zone of Visual Impact Analysis - Detailed description
• Verified Photomontage - Detailed description of the process

Further Information

• Student Software - What to get and where to get it for free
• Autodesk Student Community - Signing up and downloading your software
• Digimap - Downloading and using Digimap data
• A guide to buying laptops & desktops - What you need and how to buy it