DTM to NURBS—A Parametric Approach to Landscape Modeling for an Environmentally-Conscious Design

This research aims to develop a methodology for geometric analysis of the territory, which, by means of a specially designed digital tool, allows quantitative assessments useful for drawing up sustainability policies. The difficulty of working with this type of procedure is the sectorialisation of technical skills among those who deal with design at the architectural scale and those who work at territorial scale. The undertaken methodology establishes a workflow that can export data from a GIS tool and import it into a three-dimensional modeler. To do this you need an intermediate tool, a parametric software. The explained procedure aims to have maximum freedom of model geometries processing. Therefore, it has been based on Nurbs mathematical models. The application tested with this is the solar radiation analysis in the territory of Ortona, Italy, on the Adriatic coast. Starting from the cartographic data of the Abruzzo Region, the three-dimensional model has been developed and it has built a base for further analysis. This working methodology ensures efficient results with a low amount of human iteration to generate the final model. Some of the procedure’s limitations have been explained in detail, mainly due to the structure of the used components.