The VI-Suite: a set of environmental analysis tools with geospatial data applications

Abstract

Background:The VI-Suite is a free and open-source addon for the 3D content creation application Blender, developed primarily as a tool for the contextual and performative analysis of buildings. Its functionality has grown from simple, static lighting analysis to fully parametric lighting, shadowing, and building energy analyses. It adopts a flexible, mesh geometry based approach to the specification of calculation points and this has made it suitable for certain types of 3D geospatial analyses and data visualisation. Results: As this is the first academic paper to discuss the VI-Suite, a history of its development is presented along with a review of its capabilities of relevance to geospatial analysis. As the VI-Suite combines the functionality of 3D design software with performance simulation, some of the benefits of this combination are discussed including aspects that make it suitable for the processing and analysis of potentially large geospatial datasets. Example use cases with a 3D city model of the Hague are used to demonstrate some of the geospatial workflows possible and some of the result visualisation options. Conclusions:The free and open-source nature of the VI-Suite, combined with the use of Blender mesh geometry to define calculation points, has encouraged usage scenarios not originally intended by the authors, for example large scale urban shadow and radiation analyses. The flexibility inherent in this mesh based approach enables the analysis of large geospatial datasets by giving the user refined control over the distribution of calculation points within the model. The integration of GIS analysis into a digital design package such as Blender offers advanced geometry/material editing and specification, provides tools such as ray casting and BVH tree generation to speed up the simulation of large datasets, and enhanced visualisation of GIS simulation data including animated city fly-throughs and high quality image production. The VI-Suite is part of a completely open-source tool chain and contributions from the community are welcome to further enhance its current geospatial data capabilities.

Experimental and numerical assessment of using coconut oil as a phase‐change material for unconditioned buildings

“…The energy model was developed with the 3D design package Blender and simulated with EnergyPlus . Blender geometry and materiality was converted to the EnergyPlus input format by using the VI‐Suite with an add‐on for the 3D content creation application Blender. The basic Blender geometry model is shown in Figure C.…”

CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE): overview of developments

“…The most current list of maintained software with CityGML support is the one available at the official CityGML website 4 , and hence it is taken here as the authoritative list for this analysis. A quick inspection of the software revealed that support for ADEs is limited.…”

“…fences and city walls. 4 https://www.citygml.org/software/ 5 https://github.com/tudelft3d/3dfier 6 https://data.overheid.nl/data/dataset/3d-model-denhaag…”

“…While CityGML is intended to be a universal and application-independent geographic information model, the advent of dozens of applications and burgeoning use in different geographic contexts and software [3,4] requires some additional information that is not readily available in the CityGML data model [5]. An example of such a case is the application of 3D city models in the energy domain: a method employed to estimate the energy demand of a building may necessitate specific and less common information such as building occupancy [6], an attribute that CityGML does not envisage by default.…”

Three-Dimensional Rule-Based City Modelling to Support Urban Redevelopment Process

“…Furthermore, Nichol et al (2005) [29] used 3D Virtual Reality models to assess the quality of city environment for planning purposes. In addition, a number of open-source and free 3D design and visualisation tools are developed for urban environment planning, modelling and simulations [30,31]. In the continuum of urban planning process, the outcomes of strategic urban planning can be used to develop tools and regulations for statutory urban planning.…”