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Chris Xenon Hanson
3DNature

Chris is one of the lead programmers for 3D Nature. Many of Chris' images have been used in news media outlets to show people the location of events and assist in expanding public knowledge of breaking news events. All images are copyright Chris Hanson and 3D Nature LLC unless otherwise specified.
	US Airways Flight 1549 This image is taken from an animation that was created to visualize in 3D the complex route of US Airways Flight 1549, leaving New York's LaGuardia airport, January 15th 2009 at 3:26PM. Approximately 5 minutes later it made a forced landing in the Hudson River. All crew and passengers were rescued by boats before the aircraft sank.

	Wildfire Visualization for the Institute for Business and Home Safety 3D Nature creates Wildfire Visualization for the Institute for Business and Home Safety Recently, 3D Nature created a three-minute 3D visualization of the damaging Witch Creek Wildfire that burned for 10 days in San Diego County, Calif., in October 2007. Working on a tight budget and deadline under contract with the Institute for Business & Home Safety, 3D Nature recreated the affected areas in Visual Nature Studio, modeling terrain, roads, vegetation and houses. An informative voice-over explained the factors underlying the survival or destruction of various homes as the viewer witnessed firsthand the effects of the fire. "Wildfires are called wild for a reason, they can be uncontrollable," said IBHS President & CEO Julie Rochman. "Through the video we were able to help people understand that they can take back control by protecting their homes from these fires. We were able to illustrate that it doesn't have to cost a lot to make some very effective changes." Copies of the video were distributed to news media at press conferences in Sacramento and San Diego, and the video was shown during a presentation at the Benfield Group's West Coast Catastrophe Summit in Santa Monica. Media outlets replayed segments from the video during nightly newscasts. View the video and read the accompanying IBHS report at www.DisasterSafety.org/megafire.

	Hawaii Earthquake Oct 2006 Visualization of the Hawaii Earthquake on October 15th, 2006.

	Genesee Dam Lower Alternative, Plan 3D Nature contributed pro-bono 3D visualization and testimony in opposition to the Genesee Water District's site approval application for their Lower Alternative Site, contributing to the application's unanimous 7-0 defeat before the Jefferson County Planning Commission. Before the Commission, 3D Nature Vice President Chris Hanson gave sworn testimony and entered 3D visualizations into the record to show the Commission and all involved stakeholders what the proposed dam would look like. The planned structure was 120ft tall, 500ft long and could impound approximately 125 acre-feet of water with a 2.5 acre surface area. The visual impact of the dam, placed 600 feet from one of Colorado's state Scenic Highways, on Open Space land and adjacent to city and county recreational parks, was one of the most contentious issues of the project. Prior to 3D Nature's involvement neither side had commissioned extensive 3D visualization of the issue, leading to much argument over apparent size, visibility time and extent from the road and landscape scarring from access roads. The consensus of the opposition was that while a dam and reservoir may be necessary, the criteria that drove the selection of this site were flawed and that other sites with less detrimental effects (visual and otherwise) needed to be re-evaluated. The Jefferson County Planning Commission agreed in a unanimous 7-0 vote, noting that among other factors, the structure would be visually undesirable in ways that could not be practically mitigated. The Commission also determined that the visual aspects were contrary to the Mountain Community Master Plan, adopted in 1994, which specifically identifies the region in question as visually sensitive and marked for preservation. 3D Nature's visualizations consisted of planimetric and north and south-looking perspective views, as well as a fully interactive NatureView Express 3D Model -- all created using Visual Nature Studio 2.5. This project were created from scratch. Initial work began less than 24 hours prior to the planning meeting.

	Hurricane Rita, Potential Galveston Water Level Animation This animation was created to show the prediction of water level in Galveston, Texas, assuming a storm surge of up to 20 feet. Terrain data was 1/3rd Arcsecond NED DEM. Imagery was 30m Landsat, processed with PixelSense LS combined with 1m Color Infrared DOQQ, processed with PixelSense CIR. The NED terrain surface is made from contour maps, and does NOT include building heights, so it is not indicitive of how much the buildings themselves would be submerged. The compass rose in the upper right corner indicates North. The Water Level graph on the left indicates water level in feet, from 0 (normal sea level) to a maximum height of 20ft of storm surge. Surge height greater than 20ft was not simulated, because the maximum terrain height on the island is less than 20ft.

	EarthShine This is a night-time image and is intentionally very dark. View it in a darkened room for best effect. I created this image at 3D Nature Academy Autumn 2004, early in the week. I had seen a good Earth-shine effect one evening a few weeks before and had wondered if it was possible to replicate the effect in WCS. WCS's moon phase shading normally makes the dark portion of the moon completely dark. I worked around this by cloning the Moon Celestial Object to create two identical moons in the same spot in the sky. One had phase turned on, and the brightness turned up to give a very intense lit side. The second moon was set to not show any phase (full moon) and be normal brightness, but 95% transparent. Finally, the semi-transparent moon was moved a few thousand miles closer, to bring it in front of the half-moon so it could show through to the half-moon. The effect worked out well. The landscape and water are really just there to complete the image, they don't serve any significant artistic purpose and are somewhat boring. I did like the effect of the dark trees silhouetted against the deep blue sky. There are some aspects of moonlit water I wanted to experiment with, but I realized that computer graphics reflection algorithms can't yet replicate the technique I was pursuing.

	Road to Nowhere This image was created at 3D Nature Academy Autumn 2004, later in the week. It is inspired by a photo I took while on a camping trip to the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. The highway just seemed to go laser-straight off to the horizon and disappear with no sign of where it ended up. The mile marker beside the road read '6', which vaguely implied the end of the road was just ahead, reinforcing the nihilistic feeling. I took a photo of the mile marker for later use. The rendering began with a procedural terrain created in WCS (using the Distant Mountains Component). I used a large Area Terraffector with a wide and gentle blending profile to flatten the immediate foreground to place the road. I draw a straight line and leveled it off to make the perfectly straight road, which began as the Worn 2 Lane Highway component. In the road texturing, I used the new texture position texturing to jitter up and distort the cracks texture to get nice meandering tar-filled cracks. I also added a texture to the Reflectivity to create the mirage. I used both a soft stripe texture to keep the mirage within the lane, as well as distance and angle-based dynamic parameters to constrain where in the distance it would and would not appear. Finally, a bit of fractal noise broke up the perfect reflection area into patches. For other landcover, I added a simple snow effect using elevation, slope and relative elevation to make it lay naturally onto the landscape. The distant steep hillsides have a small amount of bumpmap-only strata to add some detail. I created two ecosystems, one desert floor with a few bush images (turned monochrome and then recolored using Image Object Library Color Control and Replace Grey in the EcoType editor) and one forest, using a variety of twisted and stunted trees (mostly the bristlecone pines from the Foliage Library). The desert floor is mostly ubiquitous below a certain elevation, though the foliage density drops off into the distance to speed rendering. The forest is the next ecosystem up in elevation, and is set to prefer exposed areas to provide a nice ridgeline counterpoint to the concave-preferring snow. The sky is a steely blue, with no clouds whatsoever to emphasize the slightly unnatural staring-into-oblivion feeling. A small vector bounds a high-resolution shadow effect just around the mile marker, which has 3D shading disabled and extra illumination to make it bright and clear.

	View From Above, 2004 This image was created from the same project as The View From Above, the VNS 2 box cover image. I replaced the NLCD, Landsat and panchromatic orthophoto data with a new overlay -- a 1 foot resolution color airphoto mosaic of all of Denver and the surrounding areas. This mosaic, created in ERMapper using data from the USGS Hi-Resolution Urban Areas Orthophoto project contains about 250 gigabytes of data, compressed down to 20Gb using the ECW file format. VNS 2's ECW support and Image Management feature made use of this enormous image practical. The level of detail in the photo is just stunning, and a rendering of this small size this is only scratching the surface of what the data has to offer. Notable landmarks include: Red Rocks Amphitheater (subject of a Nature View Express demo scene using the same orthophoto) is just in from the left edge of the picture, midway up the scene, at the edge of the foothills. Green Mountain (large eroded hill just in front of the foothills edge just left of center). North and South Table Mesa (right and left formations in front of foothills at right side of image) with city of Golden behind them. Denver Federal Center (aka "Washington West") home to many US government institutions including the USGS is just left of center and just up from the bottom of the image. It is just south of Sixth Avenue, the wide straight road running up the center of the scene. Interstate Highway 70 (I-70) snakes from the lower right to enter the foothills just left of the middle of the image. 3D Nature's Arvada office would be just out of the picture to the lower right.

	TankPack This collage is a sample of the seven different tank/silo Wall Components included in the first Tank Pack. The included components are designed for use in a relative-to-vector manner, and will adapt to different heights. These components require VNS 2 and are available for $5 each or together in a pack for $20.

	Building Pack This collage is a sample of the ten buildings (Wall Components) in the first series of Building Components. As a bonus, it includes an eleventh building, a generic night building with synthetic-looking random patterns of lit windows. Most of the building components come set to a particular size, but can be adjusted to be taller and/or shorter. These components are available for $5 each or together in a pack for $40.

	FencePack This collage is a sample of eight of the nine Fence/Wall components in the first series of Fence Components. The ninth component (not pictured) is a two-rail variation of the split rail fence. These components are available $5 each or together in a pack for $30.

	Ultimate Earth A view of the Earth From Space makes use of VNS 2 large image management. Made with the Ultimate Earth data add-on. This Earth From Space image, along with others from different viewpoints (with and without clouds) can be licensed for commercial use, starting at only $250. They are also available as free desktop wallpapers for your computer.

	VNS 2 Box Cover Image Created using the large image management features in VNS 2. Chris also used the capability to integrate many different types, resolutions and projections to overlay this aerial photo over the terrain data for the Colorado front range.

	Deckers Wildland Fire Chris Hanson, 3D Nature programmer received a fax directly from Trumbull Colorado Volunteer Fire Department the morning of May 23, 2002. It was a map created by Infrared Interpreter "D. Strom" from the previous night's midnight (aka 00:30) flyover. It showed areas of light spotting, heavy spotting and actual fire. Chris created a 3D map of the area (shown here) depicting this info. It was believed to be be both more current and possibly more accurate than the 'official' map previously offered to interested parties. Red striped areas are fire (striped in original map also) Orange dotted areas are areas of heavy spots Yellow dotted areas are areas of light spots This map was posted on PineCam, a local web site that provides information to residents and others in the area. It was the best map available to the public at the time of the fire.

	NYC This link will take you to a screen shot from the New York City Project that Chris created to show the location of the World Trade Center Towers.

	Pentagon To make this rendering of the Pentagon, three different data sources were combined. A 30m SDTS DEM of the area in a UTM system was obtained and imported through the Import Wizard. VNS automatically loaded and placed the terrain data. Next, a USGS scanned topo map (DRG) was downloaded in GeoTIFF format and added via the Image Object Library. VNS read the coordinates in the GeoTIFF and automatically referenced the image. Finally, to create the actual building, VNS's new Walls feature was used. From the draped imagery, an outline of the building was hand-traced. This outline was attached to a Wall component set to create 50m (an exaggerated estimate) tall walls, with roof. A simple suitable texture was created for the sides of the building, and the roof was textured with the same airphoto coloring the ground.

	VNS Box Cover This is a visualization of a topographic map from a region of Rocky Mountain National Park. National Park Service vegetation information and vector data was provided to VNS for photorealistic accuracy.

	High Meadows Fire Map This map shows the area that the High Meadow Fire near Bailey/Pine, Colorado burned. It managed to burn over 10,000 acres when it was finally exstinguished June 23, 2000.

	Mount Saint Helens Cartographic View Cartographic data of Mt. Saint Helens after the 1979 eruption. Data supplied by LandSat 7, JPL and USGS.

	Mount Saint Helens Photorealistic Image Photorealistic representation of Mt. Saint Helens after the 1979 eruption. Data supplied by LandSat 7, JPL and USGS.

	Mount Saint Helens Remote Sensed Data Visualization Remote Sensed data of Mt. Saint Helens after the 1979 eruption. Data supplied by LandSat 7, JPL and USGS.

	Star Mesa Image created using WCS V5 Demo Project Blue Mesa and the Star Field feature.

	Archiac Buildings This collage is a sample of the nine buildings (Wall Components) in the second series of Building Components. Most of the building components come set to a particular size. These components are available for $5 each or together in a pack for $30.