by Mark Button, Principal

Visual Environments

In Colorado ski country, red jutting rock formations wrapped with aspen, spruce, and pine rise from the landscape on all sides. Clouds laden with half rain and half ice crystals glide effortlessly over mountain peaks and through deep valleys. Low-lying meadows invite herds of elk and deer to feed on stands of thick, tall grass. The scenes are rich with color and texture and draw admiration from people all over the world.

Living part-time in Colorado ski country has become as popular as skiing itself in recent years. Today, the information superhighway is giving people the access they need to spend more time in the mountains. Cellular telephone, fax, and computer networks remove the barriers between free time and business. People can now make their stay longer in the mountains and many choose to own a home there.

Beaver Creek Resort in Colorado is a fine example of how aesthetic controls can protect scenic quality. In the village core of Beaver Creek, the setting created by the architecture is as fine as its mountain backdrop. The resort broke ground in 1980 and during the last 14 years has grown to a total of approximately 1,800 units currently developed. During its evolution, a carefully conceived land plan and a detailed set of architectural guidelines has shaped its ambience. Beaver Creek residents now look for ways to monitor impacts to the panoramic view that makes their homes so special.

Visual Environments, a landscape architectural firm specializing in visualization, provides photosimulation to land planners doing work in the area, a process becoming increasingly more popular within the profession. The process seamlessly retouches landscape photography. Photos are taken which capture important views in the community. Computer artists then alter the photos, illustrating the potential impacts of development. Planners present the photos, altered and unaltered, side by side at public meetings. Many are finding that pictures are much easier for most people to understand when compared to plan drawings, sections, and diagrams.

Photosimulations can illustrate sites from a few acres to hundreds of acres. Peter Jamar Associates, a Vail land planning firm, has used them to illustrate their current planning work within Beaver Creek Resort and several other planned unit developments. According to Peter, "The pictures are useful tools when meeting with homeowners and public officials who are concerned with the eventual appearance of proposed development projects. Parts of the site plan can be removed, deleted, or screened to mitigate visual impacts on neighbors and simulations illustrate how architectural controls such as restricting exterior building colors and establishing building height limits can help blend structures into their surroundings."

Credible photosimulations are crucial to their usefulness. People are naturally very suspicious of pictures created on a computer. Many already know that today computer imaging programs can create photos of anything. Photosimulations can only be a good communication tool if the audience knows that they are a "state of the art effort" to forecast future scenery. Following are several items that lead to useful simulations:

?EUR?View Capture - Pictures must show views that the audience will want to see. Sometimes this is a shot taken at a major intersection of two roads and sometimes it is a shot taken from someone's home. Pre-planning helps identify views that are most valued in the community. When taken with a "normal" 55 mm lens, all shots will approximate human eyesight.

Before images can be altered with a computer, they must be scanned into digital form. Scanning breaks down a picture into a mosaic of colored cells called pixels. More pixels provide more control. A computer artist can manipulate parts of a picture with high levels of accuracy. Even items that are a mile away from the camera can be altered to within two feet at the maximum resolution offered by Kodak's PhotoCD process.

?EUR?Registration - Alterations can include buildings, roads, earthworks, tree clearing plans or any other component of a site plan. People judge a simulation based on what else they see in the unaltered scene. That is why the alterations must register to existing landmarks in the photos. If existing artificial landmarks like roads or towers are not visible then survey markers must be set. Large balloons, banners, or colorful flags provide a highly visible landmark.

?EUR?Verification - Many parts of a site plan will hide behind hills and vegetation. A visibility study of a computer terrain model will weed out sites hiding behind hills. Land planning software by LANDCADD can map "hidden-zones" based on a single camera point. A site visit verifies which items disappear into the forest canopy. Hiking in to each building site and sighting back to each camera point in the community will weed out even more sites. Any remaining sites are visible from the selected viewpoints.

?EUR?Labeling - By clearly stamping the word "simulation" on each exhibit, the audience is always advised that the picture is fabricated. Since a simulation can illustrate a project at any stage from conception to design details, they can only forecast a build-out scenario. Decisions made later in the design process, like field adjustments during construction, can easily produce a "build-out" different from the simulation.

Clients and public offices will become more familiar with photosimulation technology. As this happens, the profession of landscape architecture will soon be asked to provide simulations on any project where visual issues are raised. The fact that pictures are so easy for people to understand can only enhance the exchange between developers, designers, and the community. Use of this new technology promotes designs that use screening, architectural guidelines, restrictive covenants, and careful site planning to preserve valuable visual resources in a community. LASN

Mark Button is a Landscape Arhcitect and Principal for Visual Environments. He has used computer graphics to alter landscape photography for design purposes since 1986.