Great work, -karlos-! Does OSM go show the models as soon as you tag them in OSM? How long does it take from having the models uploaded and the OSM elements tagged to showing them in OSM go?

Thanks for your comment, Omnific!

Indeed, while for most buildings the standard OSM 3D tags are perfect to display an acceptable visualization, for more complex buildings like the Space Needle, they leave much to be desired. The main purpose of the repository is to allow exactly that!

Talking about the Eiffel Tower, -karlos- is currently working on putting it on OSM go (https://osmgo.org/go.html?lat=48.857202707673856&lon=2.294501066207886&dir=0&view=-10&ele=101&user=user). The old Eiffel Tower model just needs to be removed.

As a side note, thank you for reminding me about the Space Needle! It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Seattle.

Great job, -karlos-, very happy to see the result of my work! I’ll make sure to fix that ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ header issue ASAP.

Thank you for the early response, Polyglot!

dcp:

Polyglot said it all, except linking OSM and the model repository: you would use a tag in OSM to declare the model id of the model. We’re still working on this tag.

There are currently no renderers that work with the repository, and the repository hasn’t been launched yet, but we’re working on both of these.

dcp:

Any software that exports files in the Wavefront OBJ format should work fine.

For testing purposes, I imported a model into Sketch Up from the 3D Warehouse (here), exported it to the OpenCOLLADA file format, then converted it to Wavefront OBJ in Blender.

Using Blender directly is sure to work, and most (if not all!) other programs that also export in Wavefront OBJ will work.

We’re working on it, in preparation for the launch.

Hello dkiselev!

Yes, that’s a good point, differentiating between the Y or Z up axes. I’ll take it in consideration, maybe by specifying it directly for each model, or establishing a standard for all models.

Note that I converted it from OpenCOLLADA to OBJ externally, in Blender, manually. The model stored in the repository is an OBJ, and all models will be, for now. Other model formats could be added later.

Thank you for your feedback, -karlos-.

The web interface is meant for the modelers, so that they can upload models to the repository. Of course that 3D renderers will only use the API. The repository is not exclusively for OSM, yes.

Tordanik is currently working on a draft on the tags to be used here. We have favored this id-based approach as it’s more generic versus your country, city and building-name tags idea, which would work very well for specific buildings like the Eiffel Tower, but encounter issues when used for generic models like benches and power poles.

We followed your idea of placing a tag to ignore the rendering for each 3D model in the draft above.

The GPS coordinates of the model sent back through the API are for convenience only. They’re the GPS coordinates stored in the repository, to be used for finding models on a map in the web application easily (such as going to Italy and finding the Leaning Tower of Pizza) in a slippy map. It will also be used, of course, for the range based search in the API. The coordinates stored in the OSM node should be used.

The model can have a different size, direction, and source point. Users will be able to specify the units used for the model, how it’s oriented, and a translation to apply to the model before applying any other transformations.

LOD would be an interesting idea, but it has to be skipped for now due to a lack of time, maybe after GSoC ends it can be considered.

Yes, models can include textures, both for the savings you mention and for allowing aesthetically pleasing models.

As for your last idea, about mirroring the repository, we will offer a nightlies files that you can download, which includes all the models and their metadata, so that you can do exactly that. Mirroring is a great idea and should ease any performance issues that might arise in the repository.