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 feet
The SVG viewBox is 1:1 with reality in feet. A diagram
built at a ½ mile radius has a circle 5,280 units across, with the site center
at 0,0 and north up — the file says so in its description.
That gives you exact scales without measuring:
| Set 1 drawing unit to… | Resulting scale |
|---|---|
| 1 ft | 1:1 — real size in CAD |
| 0.01 in | 1" = 100' (US engineering) |
| 0.005 in | 1" = 200' |
In Illustrator, where one SVG unit opens as one point, scale the placed file by 72% for 1" = 100' or 36% for 1" = 200'. The DXF and 3D exports (DXF, 3DM, DAE) for US sites use the same convention — 1 unit = 1 ft, with the file's unit set to feet — so a plate and the CAD base drop onto each other without scaling.
Displayed numbers on the US site — radius, dimensions, contour intervals, scale bar — are in feet and miles as well, so what you read on screen is what you get in the file.
Composing a sheet
Laying twenty-one 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
MeshToNURBconverts it to a polysurface. - SKP — SketchUp native. Opens by double-click or File ▸ Open, and SketchUp Free (web) opens it too. 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.