This is a post that I did for LinkedIn that I have copied here for others to view….
Lots of people talk about digitaltwins for cities (and more often than not focus on 3D City Information Model creation), but don’t forget that cities are supported by surrounding rural areas/hinterland! With data coming from the Environment Agency’s National LiDAR programme automated tools for geospatial software like ArcGISPro allow us to quickly create 3D building models of rural areas.
In many ways I think that these tools, although often designed for cities, work better in rural areas where building footprints are not part of larger groupings. The UK’s National LiDAR programme is great as it’s opendata and has point classification built in as well. Paul Cureton The screenshot below is 3D building models created in ArcGISPro that utilises CityEngine rules to define roof forms, yes as with all automation nothing is 100% accurate, but it is not bad for free (free data not software sorry)!
