I'd like to show you how to get started with ModelBuilder. So how to create a model, how to add data sets to it, set up the model and then run it. So here I've got some data for Toronto, I've got some high schools, some golf courses, some libraries. And some neighborhoods that have a fair amount of vegetation based on the Normalized Vegetation Index, or NDVI. These are areas that have a class of four or five, which means they have a fair amount of vegetation. So the first thing I'm going to do is create a new model. I can do that inside my file geo/ database, I just right click and select New, Toolbox. And so first I have to create a toolbox as a container that's going to be the place where I can store my models. Think of it just really like a folder, so I can call that whatever I want, I'm just going to call it Toolbox for now. And then once I have that toolbox, I can right click on that, and create a New, Model. So once you've created your model, you can open it by right clicking and selecting Edit. You would think that you would select Open, but that will actually try to run the model. So, instead of doing that, you select Edit, in order to be able to edit the model, so, select that. And that opens up a blank ModelBuilder window that you can then use to draw your flow chart on, in order to build your model. For example, if I want to use my high school data to do something with that. I just drag that onto the model and you'll see that it's automatically made that the color blue. It recognizes it as a data set and that's the color that it uses for all the data sets. Then I might want to take a tool such as the buffer tool, and drag that on to my model. And so now that's been added and it automatically has included the Output Feature Class. Because it knows that in order for the buffer tool to be completed, there has to be some kind of an output. But you'll see that this part of it is not colored in because I haven't set any of the parameters yet. To do that, all I have to do is double click on the tool, in this case, buffer, and the dialog box opens. This is exactly the same dialog box you would get if you were just opening the buffer tool interactively and using it on its own. It's the same tool as you're using inside of ModelBuilder. All you're really doing is selecting that dialog box and just filling in the parameters or populating it in advance. So you're kind of setting it up so that you can then run it later, so I'm going to select my high school for that. This is going to create an Output Feature Class called High school Buffer, we'll just leave it at that. And I'm going to set my linear distance for that to be 1,500 meters, and I am going to dissolve my buffer boundaries. And I'll just leave the rest of it as it is and say, OK. So now you can see that its colored in that part of the model because it knows what the input is. What the function's going to be with the parameters, and I've set the output so that it's all ready to go. One little tip is that you can do an Auto Layout, and then Full Extent. And that just lines everything up, and zooms in so you can see the entire model, it's just a way of sort of tidying it up. So here we have our entire model, so we can save that, so that we now can come back to that later if we want to use it again. We can validate that model, so validate the entire model. And all that does is it just checks to make sure that there isn't already an Output Feature Class with that name. It makes sure you've filled in all the parameters, and it just kind of is like a pre flight check before you actually run the model. When you're ready to run your model, just select Model, Run. You'll see that the buffer turns red, that means that it's executing that function. And when it's complete, the buffer tool and the output have a drop shadow. That's to indicate that that part of the model has been executed, has been completed. So that's it, that's essentially how you build and execute a model. I'm just going to add on a couple of things just to show you a little more about an analysis scenario. But essentially, it's more of the same. So, I can drag my libraries onto there, I'll use another buffer tool for that. I'll set the distance to 1,000 meters, I'm going to dissolve it again. Add my golf courses, do a buffer for that. 3,000 meters. Dissolve that as well. So now we have three parts to our model. Now I'm going to add in my NDVI 4 and 5, which are the neighborhoods that have vegetation. Zoom out a little bit here, I can move these things around. Now I'm going to use the intersect tool to create an intersection between all of these different input criteria. So to do this, I'm just going to draw a line from my input data set to my intersect and say, that's going to be an input feature. This is just another way of setting the parameters, or some of them at least. I'll do this for golf courses. Libraries and high schools. So now I have all of the inputs set up for my intersect. Let's just double check the parameters to make sure everything's set the way I expect to it to be. So I've got my four inputs, they're going to be buffers in my 4 and 5 NDVI classes. I'm just going to call the output Intersect, because it's not just for the NDVI 4 and 5, so I want to make sure that's easy to remember. So I'll call it Intersection, and everything else I'll keep the way it is, say OK. And so, I'll save my model, I always like to do that before I run it just in case something goes horribly wrong. And now I'm going to validate the model and run the model. And so there you go, it's actually completed the model, I guess that means that I set everything up correctly. I didn't get any error messages, so now we can have a look at the result. What I can do is move this over here a little bit and you can right click on any of the outputs. In this case, the intersection, and select Add to Display, and that provides the output for the intersection for my model. And so I've just changed the colors so you can see the output a little more easily, and so that's the result of my intersection. So that's it, that's how you get started with ModelBuilder, it's pretty easy, pretty fun, pretty straightforward to get started. You can drag and drop datasets, functions, and add parameters and run it. And it really gives you a creative visual way of being able to explore different methods. Try them out and efficiently change parameters, rerun the model, compare results. It's really a nice way to be able to work with the different tools in the software.
