Visual impact

optioneer can calculate the visual impact of a route, calculated in the following way the user specifies geodata layers in which to insert viewpoints, and a per viewpoint penalty for each layer optioneer creates arrays of viewpoints 100m apart in the sensitive layers for each tower in the route, we take the sum of the penalties of all the viewpoints from which that tower can be seen a map showing the visual impact at each point (above), and the visual impact score of each tower on the route nb the visual impact map is calculated internally, but not displayed unless you turn on another component every polygon in a layer with a penalty assigned will contain at least one viewpoint, so be careful of assigning penalties to very detailed layers (e g buildings layers which represent each building individually) either assign a low penalty (knowing that it will be multiplied by the number of buildings that can see each point) or assign a penalty to a less detailed layer instead viewpoints resulting from assigning a penalty to a detailed buildings layer configuration you must enable the “visual impact penalty” design rule this is only available for transmission lines to configure the design rule, you must provide the following information heights for the asset and viewer for efficiency, we treat all towers as being the same height; for the actual area of visibility of each tower see one of the global viewshed components, which use the final tower heights heights for layers which affect visibility (these are added to the terrain elevation) for efficiency, we make the conservative approximation that both viewers and towers are treated as standing on top of the canopy rather than directly on the terrain penalties for visually sensitive layers these penalties are applied for every (viewpoint in that layer, tower visible from that viewpoint) pair adding a penalty to a dense layer can greatly increase the amount of computation necessary polygon layers may have both heights and penalties linear feature layers may only have penalties to display the visual impact map in optioneer, turn on the “calculate visual impact map” design rule