High speed water flow simulation on a DEM

I’m helping some friends who are working on a project to visualise a whole whack of GIS data in Unity (Unity3D.com) game engine.  It looks like we’ll end up working on a GIS -> Unity workflow for generating terrains from DEMs and texture maps from orthophotos.  To top it off they’ve already got a landcover classification app running that takes landcover raster classes and creates 3D objects (grass, trees, water) in the model.  (Don’t worry, I won’t tease you by mentioning their voxel based subsurface soil model interaction).  It’s still early but really encouraging so far.

Next up is to simulate water flow in the environment and it was slim pickings for options for doing this.  Then they found the Unity asset called Surface Waves (US$80) – it does the water flow work we wanted but much more.  I just posted a really short test video to see how it worked – with both an auto generated water source and a manual placement water source, like a paint brush, that allows you to see how things will flow. It is amazingly performant on a notebook.

Be sure to check out Surface Waves’ demo video – it frees you from trying to emulate the look of water movement through shader trickery to actually simulating water flow over and around objects.  Things that used to take a sophisticated GIS quite a while to compute actually, the last time I tried anyway 🙂

More to come as we play around with it, but I put it out there in case other spatially oriented folks might be interested as well in the GIS -> Unity workflow challenges being worked through.  If so, I’ll do more video highlighting the work that’s underway.

IoT Day 4: Bidgely Cloud Energy Monitor Dashboard

After a week of collecting smart meter readings, I’m now ready to show results in a cloud-based energy monitor system – Bidgely – complete with graphs showing readings, cost and machine learning results breaking down my usage by appliance.


Bidgely Energy Monitor Dashboard - UsageThis is part 4 of a series of posts about the Internet of Things applied to Home Energy Monitoring.  I have a Smart Meter from BC Hydro, an Eagle energy monitor and various cloud apps helping me understand it all.

 

See my post from Day 1 – getting started or Day 2 – connecting to cloud services – Day 3 – viewing data


3 Value Added Parts to Bidgely

In this post I’ll show you the three parts of Bidgely that I’ve found most helpful:

  1. Usage dashboard
  2. Cost dashboard
  3. Appliance breakdown (best for last!)

Usage Dashboard

Bidgely Energy Monitor Dashboard - Usage
Bidgely Energy Monitor – Usage Dashboard

Continue reading IoT Day 4: Bidgely Cloud Energy Monitor Dashboard

Running Gephi graph vizualization on OSX Mavericks (10.9.5)

Gephi visualization running on OSX
Gephi running on OSX – showing Tyler’s social network from LinkedIn

Having trouble launching latest Gephi on OSX?  I’m running Mavericks but I’m sure this will help others who have upgraded or who are still running older versions of OSX.

From command line, use the jdkhome parameter when launching Gephi and point it to the system Java 1.6 install:

$ cd /Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/MacOS
$ ./Gephi --jdkhome /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/

 

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