Best Source of Good 3d City Models

[thomas10024]

Can anyone reccomend a definitive source for good, accurate 3d models of major world cities? We constantly have need and each time its sort of a scramble to find info. One reliable source would be great. PS-We are willing to pay.

 

Thanks,

 

-T

[Ernest Burden III]

We are willing to pay.

 

How much?

 

There are a growing number of models, some open/free like one of Boston that was pushed by the City of Boston, but it's still hit-or-miss.

 

A list of sources for this would be great, I hope people post links.

[Matt Clementson]

For the UK I know GMJ have a model of most of central London - not sure how much they charge for that though. Bath and Glasgow universities have models of their respective cities - again not sure if they're publicly available or only on 'special request'.

 

http://www.gmj.net/

[Devin Johnston]

Digimation has some.

[AJLynn]

You can get Boston here - i's not incredibly detailed or textured, but it's complete. I've seen something similar for Pittsburgh, in DWG, but I'm not sure where to get it.

[SandmanNinja]

I think it's a pretty good idea for a city council to commission something like this. If Hollywood or an ad agency is looking for a city to do 3D and live action in, it would help having a semi-accurate model.

 

Wonder if that could be a niche, long-term project?

[Dave Buchhofer]

Microsoft actually currently has a huge huge push for creating these. how available they are other than in their live earth rogram is somewhat in question. they'll let you program into/around their data, but I dont think its possible to extract it (legally) currently.

 

Ian has written a decent amount on the forum about the plusses and minuses of city models and where to locate some of them. and the talk from last years DMVC was very informative also. taken from his PPT.. (i dont remember where the original link was sorry)

> Do you need to, or can you acquire one?

Outside Vendors:

ScreamPoint and Microsoft

EarthData

Sanborn

TurboSquid and others

Even Us. (Animation Images)

[ikinman]

There isn't much of a business model (at least in my experience) in selling accurate 3D datasets of cities, because of the high costs in creating them. To guarantee accuracy, you need accurate data collection, with aerial collection being the best. Flights start at around 25K. Then one needs to convert the data into usable polygonal geometry. This can be done using software if all you want are cube shapes, but if you want more detail (setbacks, parapets, roof items such as watertowers and elevator overruns, etc) then you have to incorporate manual work.

 

A partner and I estimated that to recreate our model of Manhattan today from the Battery to 72nd street (about 15 square miles) it would cost around 200K. This was a few years ago, so the costs have fallen somewhat, though not by much as outsourcing rates have risen a bit. So the price is still in the 6 figures. And then, you have to constantly update the model to reflect changes in the city, which is also expensive.

 

So to make any money on this, you have to charge a lot to lease the models - Earth Data used to charge $2500 per square kilometer. And that's when you are guaranteed that as soon as you sell the data it will end up on a street corner in China for sale for 20 bucks, which is what happened to the NYC model that we have.

 

So in short it is difficult to find a source for accurate urban 3D data that can be readily imported into a rendering program - you can't make any money doing it. And that's why all of the efforts in the past several years by Google and Microsoft are geared towards creating environments that they control, Google Earth and Virtual Earth, that you can place objects into, but you can't access the core data (unless you steel it with one of those Open-GL screen capture programs.)

 

As visualization people, it sucks, but city models are a thing that everyone thinks are super cool but aren't willing to pay anything for; well, other than $20 bucks in Shanghai. Another issue that I pointed out in my talk was the contrast between our profession's focus on photoreal visualization with the impossibility of doing just that with massive and undetailed urban databases. To make decent visualizations of city models, you can't at all think photoreal, and need to be more diagrammatic - express information quickly and clearly. And also remember that visualizing a 3D city model is one thing from a distant aerial view, and quite another closeup, when you have no detail in the model.

 

All that being said, we have Manhattan and Brooklyn models for lease. As well, other American cities, but those may be a few years out of date, circa 2002 or so. But I would think carefully about what you want to do with them visually before committing to the cost involved in acquiring them.

 

-Ian

[Antisthenes]

do a OpenGL capture when looking at the city in googlemaps or virtualearth ?

[anthony cortez]

Ian,

 

A few years ago there was a site called Metro Blocks which you can plug in an intersection in Manhattan and you were given some options in purchasing these city blocks for about 75/block...Do you also remember the Urban Data site? We used it a while back, but I guess they went out of business.

 

Anyway, we're looking for a specific 3D block(s) in the upper east side, if you know of anyplace it can be purchased, please pass me the info...

 

Best,

 

Anthony

[Ernest Burden III]

do a OpenGL capture when looking at the city in googlemaps or virtualearth ?

 

Google Earth is OpenGL, Virtual Earth is DirectX.

 

Anyway, we're looking for a specific 3D block(s) in the upper east side, if you know of anyplace it can be purchased, please pass me the info...

 

There MAY be a model around on a weird site, I'll have to look up the link. What is the location you're looking for, and how detailed?

[ikinman]

Anthony,

 

I replied to you in a private message, but a couple of specific responses.

 

Don't know about Metroblocks (I'm pretty sure they're gone now, like everyone else), but Urban Data Solutions went under several years ago and were acquired by Earth Data, an aerial photography outfit. They are kind of out of the city model business themselves, though we have a couple of leftover bits from them (NYC, Brooklyn and some other cities).

 

Other outfits include Sanborn, which has no-detail massing of cities: accurate cubes with no setback information or sidewalks/roads, based on aerial surveys from 2001 to 2002.

 

There are reports of other companies setting up datasets of cities like New York, which would probably be the only one that might be profitable to do. But as I mentioned above, the costs are high, piracy is rampant, so it's not an appealing business plan, making it unlikely that a vendor will stay in the space very long. In the meantime, over the next 5-10 years a technology will develop that allows for instant scanning of an urban area, making this whole discussion moot.

 

As far as the Open GL screen capture, several years ago someone developed a software program that allows a user to capture 3D data that is shown on a screen. If a 3D model is used to generate an image on a screen (such as 3D data in a Google Earth model), your graphics card will interpret the 3D data into the image, and the software program will reverse engineer the data from your graphics card into a usable 3D file. Essentially this means that with that program, you can download the entire Google Earth dataset of a city that is shown on a screen into your own computer, and import it into Max, Maya or whatever your program of choice is. I saw a demonstration of this done a couple of years ago.

 

What that means is that anyone who sets up a business to securely show 3D data over the web as images instead of datasets (as Google is doing) is screwed if they think that they can securely hold onto that data by just showing it. Google doesn't care as they aren't making any money anyways selling datasets. But anyone else who wants to set up a business by prerendering datasets over the web is well and truly boned. Your entire business could be stolen in a keystroke.

 

-Ian

[anthony cortez]

Thanks for the info about what lies ahead