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Creating a region BGL using Google Earth

rhumbaflappy

rhumbaflappy

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Hi all.

A recent thread in the Ground2K/SBuilder forum had a problem of creating a tropical palm landclass. Luis Feliz Tirado provided a solution to create a local region BGL, then use orchard land class - 145 Deciduous Tree Crops to place the palm trees. Great solution.

Landclass files and region BGLs can also be made using Google Earth, the gdal_rasterize utility, and resample.

For your region, just make a polygon in Google Earth and save the KML file. I saved as doc.kml

gepoly.png


Using the gdal_rasterize utility, I entered the following command line to make a sourcefile for resample:

gdal_rasterize -burn 7 -of GTiff -tr 0.001 0.001 -ot Byte doc.kml MyRegion.tif

The result is a GeoTiff of the polygon. I then make an INF file (MyRegion.inf) for resample to use in converting the Geotiff to a BGL:

Code: 
[Source]
Type = GeoTIFF
SourceDir = "."
SourceFile = "MyRegion.tif"
Layer = Region
SamplingMethod = Majority
MajorityMode = Simple
NullValue = 0

[Destination]
DestDir = "."
DestBaseFileName    = MyRegion
DestFileType = BGL
UseSourceDimensions = 1

Drag'n'drop the INF onto resample, and you get a region BGL from Google Earth.

myregion.png


Dick
 
Thanks for sharing!
 
I downloaded the GDAL package containing the utility.
I copied the .kml in the folder that gdal_rasterize resides, but when run the command line, there was a message "cannot find file" (or something like this).

So, I reverted to "old school" method (described in the original thread), but it would be useful to have this sorted as this method is much quicker/easier.
 
I think most developers are using OSGEO4W as a means to obtain gdal, grass, qgis... and install them with the proper paths in Windows. That would probably solve path and folder issues.

Dick
 
I downloaded OSGEO4w, but it seems that sfter the "express" install some needed dll's are missing.

Anyhow, when I rectify the installation, should I copy the .kml file into the rasterizer folder, the other way around or point to the full path of the .kml in the command line?
 
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