About a week ago, I was thinking about the height of the buildings of my campus from above, especially in relation to the relatively flat terrain and skyline around Daytona Beach. Other then Embry-Riddle and the speedway, the only other ‘tall’ buildings are literally just hospitals that I can see two of from my sixth-floor dorm.

I had figured that the OSM state of the map seemed pretty good from a first glance, but looking at the F4map Demo showed me that some the 3D data was scuffed, for lack of a better term. Think: flat buildings and parking garages, ghost buildings in place of flat terrain, etcetera. I figured I could go in and correct some heights and roof shapes during class. While I was doing this, I noticed that a bunch of the building footprints were also misaligned (and some were just straight inaccurate), so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fix those in later changesets.

My first changeset that involved actually editing the shape of buildings was my first polish pass on New Residence Hall 1. This dorm, along with New Residence Hall 2, has two rather obvious wings that are connected via a hallway bridge on every floor other then the first, where the main entrances are. The F4map had this missing for both the dormitories, and the editor revealed that NRH1 was being represented by two different buildings that shared a wall each with the bridge, which was also its own building, for some reason. It was relatively easy to delete two of the ‘buildings’ and extend the third to cover NRH1’s full footprint, and using building part tags to denote the wings and bridge seemed to do the trick for the 3D map. It was also around this time that I started switching often between Bing Aerial, Esri World, and Esri Clarity as my imagery source; some of these buildings were tall enough to obscure the sidewalks and bike parking nearby.

Moving to NRH2, mapping the building parts of the east wing was a bit more complicated. The primary dorm itself is five stories tall, just like NRH1, but the first floor also hosts the Boundless Buffet. The restaurant easily extends beyond the bounds of the residence hall (almost like its own building underneath it), but it’s still very much connected to and part of the east wing. Keeping in mind the mapping conventions that I was taught, I did my best to outline the roof of the five-level dorms before moving the set towards the base of the building and then mapping out the restaurant afterward. I also saw the the Center for Faith and Spirituality was missing its comparatively unique roof in the midst of all the rectangular dormitories, so adding that 3D data was simple enough.

In regards to the Fitness Center and the New Residence Hall 3, a majority of the image sources seemed to have been taken from during or before their construction. Both buildings were initially simplified blocks of their footprints, and the process to get them accurate was a lot like vacuum-sealing Lego bricks. That, along with normalizing the level of detail around it all (including grass patches, sidewalks, bike parking, etcetera), made up the third and later changesets. Doolittle Hall was particularly lonely without all the greenery around it.