To support planning for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, AAMHatch created a true orthophoto, which provides a perfect plan view, where everything is straight up and down, true to size and scale, everywhere, at all elevations. An image of each face of the building in the City of Melbourne had to be mapped to a polygon that would be extruded from the roofline of the building to the ground. Otherwise, tall buildings and elevated structures will appear to lean over.

Two days’ worth of development of a GEOPAK macro, with the assistance of Bentley Civil developers, and two minutes to run the macro saved hundreds of hours of manual editing to extrude each feature. The $1,500 investment in coding time yielded more than $40,000 in savings.