Finishing Site Analysis SVGs in Illustrator

sitedia's default export is SVG rather than PNG for one reason: report work finishes in Illustrator. Nobody ships a generated drawing untouched — you highlight the buildings that matter, add arrows and callouts, pull the palette toward your office template. That editing needs vectors, not pixels.

How the layers are organized

Open a downloaded SVG in Illustrator or Inkscape and the artwork is already split into named layers (via inkscape:label): the base disc, grouped geometry by category, and the site marker, each separate. So you can:

• Turn off the base disc and place the drawing on a transparent background.
• Select one category — say all retail buildings — and recolor the whole set at once. Every member of a category shares an identical fill, so Select → Same → Fill Color works cleanly.
• Scale or replace the red site marker on its own.

Scale — the coordinates are meters

The SVG viewBox is 1:1 with reality in meters. A diagram built at a ½ mile radius (805 m) has a circle 1,610 units across.

That gives you exact scales without measuring:

If you work in feet, the cleanest route is to place the SVG and scale by 3.280839895 once — after that one unit is one foot and every drawing in the set stays consistent. The DXF export follows the same convention (1 unit = 1 m), so set your CAD drawing units to meters, or scale on insert.

Displayed numbers on the US site — radius, dimensions, contour intervals, scale bar — are all in feet and miles. Only the coordinate system underneath is metric, and it is stated in the file so nobody has to guess.

Composing a sheet

Laying twelve panels onto one page is its own repetitive job, so it is built in. The Sheet tab takes your selection, a paper size (A4 through A1, or 16:9) and a column count, and returns one SVG with titles, legend, scale bar and border already placed.

The legend is generated from the panels you actually kept and the colors you actually chose — which means the drawing and its legend cannot disagree. That is the failure this feature exists to prevent.

Need raster for print? Export the sheet at 300 dpi. Need vector? Place the SVG straight into InDesign or Illustrator.

When PNG is the right answer

• Slide decks. If no vector editing is coming, PNG is lighter and less likely to break. Set the pixel size before generating (default 2000 px) so it does not depend on your screen.
• Layer stack. The axonometric stack exports with a transparent background, so it drops onto a dark cover without masking.
• 3D views. The building mass PNG saves at a fixed resolution independent of your window, cropped to the model silhouette.

Taking it into 3D

The Building mass tab extrudes the same buildings — recorded height where available, otherwise floors × floor height — and exports three ways:

• GLB — a triangle mesh for viewing and sharing. Opens in Blender, Rhino, or anything that reads glTF.
• 3DM — Rhino native. Buildings come in as closed solids (Extrusions), so they are boolean-ready; terrain is a closed mesh, so MeshToNURB converts it to a polysurface.
• DAE — SketchUp. One group per building with real faces, so push-pull works immediately.

Green space, water and roads come in as surfaces draped on the terrain, split into layers or groups by category and pre-colored. That is usually enough to be a context model for a massing study without further cleanup.

One habit worth keeping

Every exported file carries a source note. When you rework a drawing, leave it in — or move it to your sheet's credits. Six months later, when a reviewer asks where the year-built data came from and how current it is, that line is the difference between an answer and a shrug.

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