@chemtech said:
First off, remember that I offered these as suggestions of ways to attack the problem, so this was just my version of a brainstorm idea, and second, I have never used any GIS functions, I don't even know what you're refering to, but I think I can get and idea from your discriptions.
It sounds like you're on the right track. If you can get the photo size to match the size of the footprint of the building, or vice versa, then, measure the size of one side of the footprint in the real world, (get the width of one of the buildings) use the tapemeasure to rescale based on the width of that building. Then just use it to measure the heights of other buildings in the photo.
I'm pretty sure that to do this accurately, you're going to have to use photomatch, rather than just painting a photo on as texture, because photomatch takes into account the perspective of the photo, and thus, measurements are related to the "vanishing point" of the photo, regular imported photos (I don't think) will do this.
This all sounds like a fun project. Also, if you can make this work, you also might consider posting a tutorial in the turorial section.
GT
I'll definitely do this process for the down town area (where the focus of most people’s attention would be) and some of our more popular areas of town. I don't think I'll be going down each block and taking pictures of ever household I think it would consume a bit too much time. (even though that would be wicked, I mean who doesn't wanna see their house on google earth in 3D?) Once I get my process down and get a decent collection going I’d really enjoy making a tutorial .
Oh also another thing that I've been doing is assuming the height of a door is about 7foot (you can usually tell if it’s a bit taller) so using the tape measure tool you can use the door as a known height to scale the building as a whole (if you didn't have a chance to get an actual measurement to use scale the building)
@ehaflett said:
Since you said you're using ArcGIS it's possible that you have MOD IV (tax and parcel) data for your city. This data will often contain a Building Description (BldgDesc) field that may be helpful in knowing how many stories the buildings are. You could do a spatial query to transfer this attribute, or at least part of it, to your building footprints. This would work in the method you described in your original post where you multiply the # of stories by a number but would not require you to go out and collect this data.
I was kind of waiting for this to catch your eye
thank you for the tip, I'mma go search our city data asap to try and find that information. It would make this much easier than going out into the field and collecting the story data.
