One of the nice things to come out of Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording has been the chance to collaborate with colleagues in Ireland on some experimental visualization.
I'm very grateful to the Discovery Programme for supplying some of their very high resolution Fli-Map airborne lidar (c.2m ground resolution) to play about with, including attempting a visualization of the iconic Hill of Tara in CryENGINE.
Tara is an interesting landscape to work with. The earthworks are well defined and the lidar data quite startling in its clarity, there are also numerous crowd-sourced ground level photographs to work from. Working in CE1 was a little disappointing, although layering textures from derivatives of the lidar terrain data (slope mapping, solar insolation modelling, etc) shows promise. Far better at the moment is CE2, with its much improved lighting and vegetation. Below is a rough render of the initial model, with more to follow in due course.
Getting the vegetation right here is key and requires considerably more work before even beginning to think about adding arcitectural detail. Great to have such fantastic data to work with.
