Zones d'influence visuelle (ZIV)
Visual influence zones (viewsheds) computed from the French IGN LiDAR HD elevation data: downloads the tiles covering an area of interest, merges them, computes the viewshed and loads the result styled in the project.
ZIV_prime computes Visual Influence Zones - in French "zones d'influence visuelle", ZIV - for a project site, from the high-resolution LiDAR HD elevation data published by the French National Geographic Institute (IGN). Typical use: assessing how far, and from where, a planned installation (solar farm, wind turbines, buildings) would be visible in the surrounding landscape.
Given an area of interest, the plugin lists and downloads the IGN LiDAR HD tiles that intersect it (terrain model, surface model, canopy height model or raw point clouds), merges and resamples them, computes the viewshed over the resulting terrain, and automatically masks out woodland (IGN BD Foret) and buildings (IGN BD TOPO). The resulting raster is loaded into the project with a ready-made "night" styling. It can optionally suggest photo viewpoints for photomontages, spread evenly across disjoint visible patches and across distance rings, and placed on roads or close to buildings rather than in the middle of a field.
The visibility algorithms ship with the plugin as an internal Processing provider, so no companion plugin has to be installed. The only Python dependencies are requests and numpy, both already bundled with QGIS.
CREDITS - this plugin stands on two open-source QGIS plugins and would not exist without them:
- The visibility engine (createviewpoints and viewshed) is derived from "Visibility Analysis" by Zoran Cuckovic, released under the GNU GPL v3 - https://github.com/zoran-cuckovic/QGIS-visibility-analysis
- The discovery and download of the IGN LiDAR HD tiles is derived from "PointCloudFR" by Samy KHELIL, released under the GNU GPL v2 or later - https://github.com/sameeeyy/PointCloudFR
ZIV_prime as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License v3 or later; see the LICENSE file shipped with the plugin. Elevation and landcover data (c) IGN, Licence Ouverte / Open Licence.