visual assessment

Green Cat have vast experience in landscape and visual impact assessment with a team of landscape architects, consultants and graphics technicians. The team has supported the delivery and assessment for projects ranging from small-scale wind turbines, large scale wind farms, solar development and hydroelectric projects. All work is carried out to current standards and best practices using the latest software and technology, such as full-frame digital camera images, GIS mapping, ReSoft Windfarm and Augmented Reality Real-Time Visualisation software (Ventus AR).

Our Landscape Consultants are experienced in the following:

• Project concept development and design
• GIS Constraints Mapping.
• Pre-application consultation with Municipalities and other stakeholders
• Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment.
• Cumulative Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment.
• Residential Visual Amenity Assessment (RVAS).
• In-House Landscape Photography
• Visualisation production
• Augmented Reality Real-time Visualisations via Venus AR

Solar arrays are particularly difficult to accurately represent in the landscape using traditional rendering software, GCR have worked alongside TrueViewVisuals (TVV) to develop an in-field visualisation tool called Ventus AR.

The Ventus AR software is an augmented reality tool that can be used at various stages of development for a renewable energy project. The software is uploaded onto a tablet device where the solar panel numbers or turbine layout, dimensions, orientation, co-ordinates and terrain data are inputted, at this stage numerous options can be loaded in order to best understand the scale of development suitable for the surrounding landscape or to consider design options.  Once on site the Ventus AR App is opened, the project can be viewed through augmented reality allowing the viewer to see live, instantaneous visualisation of how the development will appear from that location. This can be calibrated to reference structures to verify the accuracy of the representation.

 This is a useful tool as it allows a number of locations to be visited as well as different options tested while on site, without the need to go back to the office and process any photography and undertake any post processing or rendering of the images.  The tool can be used to consider potential design options for a given site, used to show neighbouring residents how the development might appear from their properties and show members of the municipal planning department live images on site of the potential visual impact of a proposed development.

The figure below shows an example output image from the Ventus AR tool which was generated on-site.