3D City Modeling

I'll be hosting a webinar on December 9th entitled: "3D City Construction Workflows: From Collection to Presentation". This will be an opportunity for us to explore workflows for planning projects and developing 3D building content data, which can then be fed into various GIS and mapping applications. We'll also take a look at data presentation: methods for visualizing and sharing the data.

3D city modeling is a rather nebulous topic, and there are many ways to create 3D city models. Here are a few different options:

- Automatically extruding 2D building polygons digitized from an ortho, either from a rooftop Z value or guesstimating the height. This is the "quick and dirty" method.
- Manually model each building individually and tag it with an XY location (often guesstimating the spatial dimensions). These models may be based on ground photos, oblique imagery, or a combination.
- Photogrammetrically measure and extrude buildings.
- Photogrammetrically measure and extrue buildings, and then model further detail and add elements such as photo-texture.

The webinar will primarily focus on the 3rd option: using photogrammetric tools to measure buildings. In addition to the actual extraction process, other discussion points such as data capture, data quality, accuracy, and other topics will be outlined as well.

If you're a GIS/photogrammetry/mapping professional, please tune in to one of the scheduled webinars. You can sign up here.