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Online maps with OpenStreetMap and Osmbuildings free topography programs
Open source online mapping programs - free software - such as OpenStreetMap or theOsmbuildings they are changing the way of seeing cities and territory. When we do a project of architecture or an urban action, the aspect of the topography urban, of the urban environment, is always a delicate subject; how we present it, it will look good … etc. Here, the work of the surveyor wave mapping that we can use will be key.
The network offers us an enormous field of possibilities, withonline mapping tools free of which we can obtain a lot of information and that complements our work.
With the altruistic will of many professionals in the topographic sector, the computing and of the mapping, new initiatives are appearing that promote free information and thanks to them, we can enjoy new surveying applications. An example would be …
OpenStreetMap topographic relief of your neighborhood
The correct question would be, How to print your neighborhood in 3D? …We really have to thank Mapzen, who offers a free service from… Print your neighborhood in 3D! through an open source initiative (Opensource) based on the Open Street Map. The next image is looking for the famous Empire State Building with an application of Mapzen.
We can access from HERE and looking for any urban topography we want from the world, just print as "city tiles", download the printing OBJ file or you can open it in Autocad.
Be careful! … Only the buildings what are OpenStreetMap (vectorized in the HERE), so we will not be able to see and we have all the urban framework of cities.
Osmbuildings topographic relief of your city
The Osm buildings it may be the graphic map What else may interest us … Consult from HERE.
TheOSM Buindings maps is a small Javascript library that allows you to extrude the 2D geometries from OpenStreetMap in 3D and view them in interactive maps. An example; We go to Madrid (Spain) to the Plaza de España and we see the following:
The orange box is what we can print or transfer to an editing program such as Autocad or similar, only the buildings. (The orange box is enlarged with the mouse wheel)
You will see that when you are inside the application, the tab appears 3D Print. If we click, it will take us to a portal where in addition to printing the area marked with different 3D services, we can download the file in STL format, and we would have something like …
The STL file. It is a computer-aided design (CAD) computer file format that defines 3D object geometry, excluding information such as color, textures or physical properties that do include other CAD formats. So when we go to Autocad and we have …
And all this, in a fast and easy way, being able to consult any city in the world.
Some of you might think … How to add objects or information to Osm Buildings maps? Actually, we should touch on the subject of Javascript code, CSS … etc, which does not apply here. But there are also other options that are also attractive and from which we can improve the map data. In this case we move to Cartodb, a maps application that, although paid, we have a free section that we can do some interesting things with the map. To continue you have to watch the video HERE and things get a little more complicated.
It is highly recommended to take a tour of the interactive map article where we show, in addition to different tools, an application that is part of OsmBuildings, improving the appearance of the map.
Topographic relief of a terrain
We've only seen buildings, but what about the terrain. Well, there are also map applications to obtain the topography of a 3D terrain as we have seen previously. For printing we can access the online web serviceTerrain2STL (Consult from WHAT) where we can download the STL file of a terrain relief.
A little more complicated but with better results is the DEMto3D, a free software for low cost 3D printing of relief maps,is the first tool that unites S.I.G (Geographic information system) and 3D printing developed by theEngineering in Geodesy and Cartography from the University of Jaén (We can know more to install it from HERE) whose impressive result and that we can see interactively from WHERE with an explanation included.
The example is the following image of the Sierra de Jabalcuz (Jaén - Spain)
Online map programs
Other open source options that work with the Open Street Map and the Osm Buildings can be the famous OpenWebGis that from a video HERE we can get into its operation.
More like Cartodb intended for maps can be Mapbox (Consult from HERE) or the Arcgis (From the following web) that they have their free trial zone being able to obtain some benefit or opt for the PRO.
Remember that we have an interesting article on how to get hundreds of 3D and 2D Autocad blocks for our projects, and totally free!
With this article we only want to give a vision of the world of topography and relief of cities from an easy perspective to use in our projects or simply to be able to 3D print the framework that we want.
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