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Jan 22
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3D GIS – Land eXplorer Review

By 3DGIS, ArcScene, Land eXlplorer


Duncan Smith, an up and coming PhD student at CASA, has been putting Land eXplorer through its paces these last few weeks. In the spirit of the centre he kindly produced a blog post and a movie of his thoughts:

The aim of digital cities is to combine photorealistic urban visualisations with rich analysis tools for built environment professionals and the public. We’ve seen some exciting advances towards this goal recently, but we’re not quite there yet. Right now it’s difficult to make the link between the analysis and database functions of GIS software, and the photorealistic visualisations that 3D graphics software provides. 3D GIS applications like ESRI ArcScene are a step in the right direction, but don’t yet offer the 3D graphics power, or web publishing functions, that ideally we’d like to see.

The software developer 3D Geo GmbH, a spin-off of the Hasso Platter-Institute for system technique (HPI), has recently released their LandXplorer software to allow the creation of 3D city models that combine GIS functions with photorealistic graphics. LandXplorer was used to create the excellent Berlin and Dresden 3d models published in Google Earth. 3D Geo are also a key developer in the CityGML standard for 3D urban data. We’ve been testing LandXplorer Studio and are impressed with its features.

The YouTube movie embeded below shows some highlights:

Very large terrain datasets can be viewed and explored in 3D. We managed to load in all of Greater London at 4m resolution, and our Stratford data at 1m resolution. It is straightforward to import shapefiles of building outlines to create basic 3d city models on top of this terrain layer. The building models can be classified with attributes as the Stratford example shows. You can skip between the 3D attribute view and phototextured views, with the software handling aerial photography well and allowing the importing of textured buildings in 3ds format.

Overall LandXplorer is an innovative piece of software that brings functional digital cities a step closer. Currently it doesn’t offer much in the way of spatial analysis, but 3D Geo as ESRI have recently become integration partners so this should improve in future releases.

Take a look at the Land eXplorer home page for a free viewer and a ‘try before you buy’ demo.

Thanks Duncan…

Jan 22
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Crysis – Importing City Models: St Pauls Cathedral

By 3D Max, 3D Modelling, Crysis, SketchUp

A second post on Crysis as we continue to experiment with the game engine for importing architectural and city models direct from Sketchup/3D Max and ESRI ArcScene.

Embedded below is a movie detailing progress on importing sections of our Virtual London model. Note the landmark buildings – St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern. Also note the satellite photograph which can be used to trace in the road layout, placement of vegetation etc:

Our previous movie for reference is embedded below, illustrating a textured model originally constructed in SketchUp:

We should have an update movie later today with road layouts and reflective water etc, once we have the import path complete we will also upload a tutorial.

At the moment Crysis is proving to be an extremely effective engine for both city and architectural visualisation…

Jan 21
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Digital Maps: Paper Map Companies Folding

By mapping

Ted Roelofs of Michigan News has written a thought provoking article on the closure of Metro Graphic Arts – a traditional paper map publishing company.

Ted writes: You can still find them hanging in fire stations, city halls, schools, even floral shops: comforting, detailed, familiar guides from a fading world.

Press Photos/Jon M. BrouwerWilliam Clifford is president of Metro Graphics Arts, which is to close next month.

The paper map.

Unfortunately for Metro Graphic Arts, of Grand Rapids, they seem to be headed the way of the buggy whip and the typewriter.

The 62-year-old company expects to close its doors by the end of February, as it sells out the last of its street guides and wall maps. Too many customers are turning to GPS devices and Internet maps, instead of what Metro Graphic offers.

You can read the full story at MLive.com. Its a sign of the times, with increasingly numbers of mobile digital devices the need for paper maps is indeed declining. Yet there is something about the paper map that a GPS or teleatlas derived system cannot match and it would be a sad day to see the demise of the paper map companies..

Story picked up via All Points Blog

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