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Allow the use of rasters for importing and exporting data. Rasters take up significantly less space than a vector file and require less pre and post processing. Spatial layers like roughness, 2D hydraulic conditions, Infiltration, etc. could be imported a raster rather than a vector. Most importantly results from the 2D mesh should be able to be exported as a raster, producing smaller output files that are significantly easier to load within and outside of the software. This would save significant time and would show that ICM can compete with other modelling software providers that already have this option. Many clients are wanting more and more 2D models.
Thank you for raising this and thanks to those who voted.
I agree that this is a great idea and I am pleased to share that as of ICM 2026.3, users will be able to create direction, speed and depth rasters of their 2D mesh. I see that you mentioned other types of rasters which we haven't enabled and therefore, I will progress the status of this idea to "Under Consideration" so we assess the effort and the technical feasibility of enabling these improvements.
Really good idea, having been meaning to log myself!
This would also avoid the extremely (!!!) frustrating process of having to fix tiny overlaps between input layers such as infiltration layers and roughness layers (yes there's the priority code thing for roughness but it's still annoying to use).
I imagine it may also speed up the mesher which seems to be very computationally inefficient when dealing with complex vector layers - gets very slow with complex inputs.... but all it's doing is matching cell centroids to a input layer to get a roughness etc, something that shouldn't really depend on the complexity of the input layer (i.e. in GIS software the speed is the same regardless of input complexity).
Great Idea