[OSM-talk] Extruded buildings

[Steve Chilton]

Artem,

My view is that is has to be done really well (and completely) to be of
any real value. Once you start putting any height visualisation in
people want accuracy (cf SteveC's post about accurately surveyed detail
of major buildings like the one you illustrated your posting with)
rather than impressions. So, actual heights, or numbers of stories, are
an absolute must.
Some people have spent a lot of time on this and still not got in right.
In April Google (Map) released 2.5D buildings in some major cities, but
I do not like the result.
See blog posting at:
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/04/new_google_maps_feat.htm
l
and click the image or the text link to see some of San Fransisco.

Small commercial projects such as Mapscape
(http://www.mapscape.net/map.cfm)
have done good stuff over small areas, and large research projects like
UCL's CASA (http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/projects/projectDetail.asp?ID=55)
have produced fabulous 3D models (of all of London) [but even they fell
foul of OS licensing when it came to releasing the results more
formally!].

So, in conclusion, whilst I admire your enterprise in working on this
idea of extending OSM data and it's uses I would argue that we have more
immediate areas to work on - such as mapping more areas that are
sparse/blank, improving the rendering of existing map features (for
example tunnels and bridges in the mapnik layer), dealing with major
flaws like the rendering of coastline detail at all scales (am just
trying to map some of my recent NZ trip, where there is no coastline
data to tie in and refer to) to name but three.

All best
STEVE

Steve Chilton, Learning Support Fellow
Learning and Technical Support Unit Manager 
School of Health and Social Sciences
Middlesex University
phone/fax: 020 8411 5355
email: steve8 at mdx.ac.uk

Chair of the Society of Cartographers: http://www.soc.org.uk/

SoC conference 2007:
http://www.port.ac.uk/special/soc/

Mind the (Map) Gap:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5413010.stm



-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
[mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Artem Pavlenko
Sent: 17 September 2007 10:24
To: OSM; dev at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [OSM-talk] Extruded buildings

Hello Lists,

I  added support for extruded polygons in Mapnik - BuildingSymbolizer.
Here is an example: http://artem.dev.openstreetmap.org/files/osm_3d.png
What do cartographers and everyone else think about rendering :
museums, train stations, universities (anything else??) as pseudo 3d
shapes?

Cheers,
Artem

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