City of Hamilton geographers have created a 3-D map which is animated and shows what the waters of the flood in 1913 could have looked like on the citys present landscape. The idea started with a what if scenario by a senior utilities engineer technician. She was at one of the committee meetings for flood commemoration and started to wonder whether the Miami Conservancy District was in the possession of a flood inundation map. The Conservancy did have maps illustrating the water levels from the flood. But, it did not have anything like what the technician had in mind, that is, any means to demonstrate what would take place if the Conservancy had not done the job on the river channel and other measures to prevent floods.
The technician took the help of a city Fellow in Underground Utilities and an analyst in Geographical Information Systems. Together, they started gathering historical and technical data and started asking the questions What if Hamiltons landscape had never changed? and What would take place if there was no presence of the Miami Conservancy District?
Some of the technology which the team of two used to make the map is what was already in place for tasks such as prediction of failure in the water lines of the city, which assists in scheduling construction and road pavement. Usually, the approach used to involve looking forward, but during the time of creating the map, it involved going back in time by looking backwards.
Several elements were combined, starting with the US Geographical Survey maps of 1915 before the conservancy commenced its work and the 3-D renderings of the citys contemporary buildings to offer it some well-known reference points. The road maps were imported on top of the elevated model. They wanted to have a component which people could identify with. If the impact of what people can do is to be shown, the people need to be able to view something which could be related to in the present.
The 3-D map shows the overflowing of the water over the banks of the river in the downtown. It also shows how the flood entered from the east as a consequence of the failure of the hydraulic system which was in the north of the city. The finished animation also has historic photos from the flood of 1913. The techniques involved in the creation of the map combined data across different programs and platforms.
To build such software, render farms are used. Render farms are computer clusters which offer high performance to render computer-generated imagery. There are several rendering engines used in the industry and V-Ray is one of them. A render farm which uses the V-Ray rendering engine is known as a vray render farm.
As far as render farm price is concerned, they have become highly affordable due to market competition. Today, you could find respectable companies providing services at very cheap rates per day. A price of $30 per node per day is an example.
Fox Render Farm is a reputed online render farm. Their work has been recognized by several CG production companies. You could rest assured that your CG projects would be dealt with in a professional manner and at affordable rates.
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