Vector Data

• Water surfaces
• Create building from footprints
• Arrows

Expects a polygon shapefile with certain attributes. Depending on the given attributes geometry is created and rendered in Biosphere.

In the layer properties, an altitude offset can be set, to place the geometry higher or lower.

The colors-strings that are used below are comma-separated rgb-triples to specify the red, green and blue color part, each in the range from 0 to 255. Some examples:

• red: 255,0,0
• yellow: 255,255,0
• white: 255,255,255
• black: 0,0,0
• dark gray: 50,50,50

Water surfaces

This layer type uses shapefile polygons to create water surfaces. The following attributes are available:

• B3DLaTyp – an optional string attribute with the value "water" makes sure Biosphere recognizes this polygon as a water surface
• waveLen - a double value for the wave length, useful values lie between 0.1 and 10
• waveHgt - a double value for the wave height, useful values lie between 0.001 and 0.1
• color - a string to specify the water color, see examples above; to animate the color, use the second attribute colorTo to blend between the two attributes
• evelation – a double value to set the altitude absolute to sea level in meter, if it’s a 2,5D Shapefile, the attribute value is added to the existing z-values
• the water height can be animated with the two double attributes heightFrom and heightTo, if elevation is set, it is added to those two values

If the attributes "waveLen" and "waveHgt" don't exist or if the entries are zero, the values from the global water surface will be used instead.

Water specific layer options in the "configure vector data" dialog are:

• water animation length: with smaller values, the waves move slower with active animation
• disable reflection: compute no reflection for a faster rendering
• disable rotation: compute reflection as if this surface is a flat one, for small surfaces this may show no visible artifacts, while the computed reflection may be reused for other surfaces which speeds up render times

Create building from footprints

This layer type takes polygons from shapefiles. After placing the polygons on the ground, blocks are created by extruding the polygons upward and downward. Downward extrusion is useful to fill the gap between the polygon and the ground in uneven terrain.

The amount can be controlled with the sliders for the height and negative height in the layer settings. This values effect all polygons in a shapefile, that have no such value specified in its attributes. There are four attributes to customize single polygon:

• B3DLaTyp – an optional string attribute with the value "building" makes sure Biosphere recognizes this polygon as a building footprint
• height - a double value for the upward extrusion
• negheight - a double value for the downward extrusion
• wallcolor - a string to specify the wall color, see examples above
• roofcolor - a string to specify the roof color, see examples above

Arrows

This layer type uses point shape files to show arrows in a horizontal plane starting at point location. The following attributes are used:

• B3DLaTyp - an optional string attribute with the value "arrow2D" makes sure Biosphere recognizes points as arrows
• u - holds the x component of the arrow direction and length
• v - holds the y component of the arrow direction and length
• u1, v1, u2, v2, … - optional further numbered uv- column pairs to create an arrow animation, time between the columns is set in the layer properties

Arrow specific layer options in the "configure vector data" dialog are:

• arrow length factor: a scale factor for the given arrow length
• time between columns: if multiple uv-columns are given, the time used to blend between each column pair can be set
• single state animation style: if just one uv-column pair is given, an animation mode can be set
  • none means no animation
  • with move, the whole arrow is moved a bit in arrow direction
  • with pulse, a small band moves over the arrow
• single state animation pulse color: select a color for the small animated band
• single state animation length: set animation speed
• color mapping to color the arrows, as described here [Configure Color Map], the numeric value in that case is the arrow length as given in the shape file