[QGIS-Developer] QGIS 3D: looking below the terrain model

[Nyall Dawson]

On 15 December 2017 at 21:54, Vincent Habchi <vince at macports.org> wrote:

> My experience as a journalist who speaks to quite a lot of people using GIS in local governments and elsewhere is that 3D is rarely, if ever used, and for the time being is more a gadget than a real useful tool.

One thing I would really like to see added in the 3D support before
3.0 release would be to add a "save as image" option. Currently it's
great to be able to play with data in 3d, but adding the option to
export the camera view to an image file would take take the 3D support
from being purely "exploratory" to instead becoming a "visualisation"
tool.

> 1. LiDAR point clouds (I’d say that integrating point clouds viz into QGis is as important as being able to represent 3D volumes).
>
> 2. BIM - SIG convergence.
>
> 3. Utility network management (which raises the point of underground representation).
>

Totally agree with all the above. Personally, I'd love to see some
group of users start to take charge of extending QGIS' BIM
functionality/integration abilities. Is this something you'd (or any
other readers) be interested in doing? I'd suggest starting with a
thread on the user list, and start collating documents (e.g. via
google drive) for requirements/desires to make QGIS a first class
player in the BIM world.

> Besides, is QGIS 3D powered by the 3D functions of Qt? Because I heard about the Globe plugin being underpinned by Open Scene Graph, and I’d hate, as a packager, to see the number of dependencies barrel out of control just because the 3D support hasn’t be harmonised to a single API.

Yes, it uses the Qt 3D module, not OSG. There's another thread on this
list from last week discussing what future the globe plugin has.

Nyall