Open source geospatial 3D innovation has just reached another important milestone, thanks to a Cesium Ecosystem Grant for a new 3D globe view in QGIS. This is the second grant that the team of North Road and Lutra Consulting received from Cesium, and we’re proud of what we’ve delivered for our QGIS users. The new 3D globe will be available to all in QGIS v.3.44.
This was an extremely interesting project to undertake, as it required a heavy research and experimentation process by our developers. There’s many potential approaches for implementing a large-scale, 3D globe, and each have their advantages and trade-offs. We were very lucky to have insight from Cesium’s Kevin Ring to advise us at the start of this process, and his advise proved critical for the ultimate success of the project.
So what did we deliver?
QGIS 3D Globe
The new QGIS 3D Globe offers:
- A new mode for visualising 3D data in QGIS, which is available alongside the existing mode for projected 3D maps views.
- Super-smooth navigation of globes, with intuitive, user-friendly interaction.
- Geospatially accurate display of 3D content, such as 3D Tiles from Cesium ion and point clouds.
- Projected 2D map content (such as raster, mesh and vector datasets) display on the surface of the globe.
- 3D globes respect the QGIS project’s ellipsoid and coordinate reference system settings, and can be used for both Earth based visualisations or any other celestial body (i.e. you can create 3D maps of Mars!)
- 3D globes are saved in QGIS projects, along with their lighting, effects, animations, and initial view settings.
- Users can rename, duplicate and remove 3D globes, using the same interface as for managing 3D map
QGIS 3D Enhancements
Alongside the development of the 3D Globe, we also implement numerous related fixes and optimisations across other parts of QGIS. Even if you never create a 3D globe, then you’ll still benefit from Cesium’s grant!
- Non-globe 3D views now work nicely with large scenes, allowing creation of city, state or country wide 3D scenes.
- Navigation in 3D views has been optimised and is noticeably smoother.
- The QGIS APIs for working with coordinate reference systems and transformation handling have been improved to better handle non-Earth bodies.
- Hundreds of cleanups across QGIS’ 3D codebase and API, which simplify object transformations and in general make the API more predictable and easy to work with.
- Fixes for rendering of vector tiles and XYZ raster tile layers
Our development team included Nyall Dawson (from North Road), Martin Dobiaš, Stefanos Natsis and David Koňarík (from Lutra Consulting). The North Road and Lutra Consulting partnership has been instrumental in development of 3D support in QGIS, and is directly responsible for the robust, feature-full 3D toolset QGIS users enjoy today. We have many future enhancements planned for 3D in QGIS, and currently have launched our crowdfunding campaign for Digital Twins in QGIS. If you want to be part of the action and help make this work possible, check out the full details here.