[QGIS-Developer] QgsServer and 3d tiles

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hello,

On 03/11/2017 21:04, G. Allegri wrote:
> What if we had a QgsServer service dedicates to serving 3d tiles for
> Cesium or iTowns?
> Is anybody working on this?

At Oslandia, we work on 3D topics a lot, and 3d tiles in particular. We
are implementing 3D Tiles support in iTowns, and several components to
serve this format as webservices.

E.g. :
- https://github.com/Oslandia/building-server
- https://github.com/Oslandia/lopocs

I do not think having QGIS Server serving 3D tiles is a really good idea.

First, 3D tiles is a format ( and protocol) to serve tiles of objects in
a mostly static way. Therefore, what would be interesting is for QGIS to
have a way to export data as 3d Tiles. These tiles can then be served
with a simple HTTP server, no need for a QGIS Server component.

Moreover, there are a lot of use cases where we want to serve 3D Tiles
without using QGIS at all. Component-oriented architecture is better
than monolithic software.

What I see as best approach would be to mutualize as much code as
possible regarding 3D tiles in py3dtiles :
https://github.com/Oslandia/py3dtiles

Using this module, we can write a 3dtile exporter, as a Processing
module for example. We already have some draft code to do that for some
data sets.
Then, we could have an independant 3D tiles server reusing py3dtiles, or
integrate this as QGIS Server module if we want.

We would be happy to work on these subjects and share our experience on
all 3D-related topics. Funding is also very welcome.

But for now, I think we should focus on releasing QGIS3 in a usable
state. We have waited for too long, and there is still work to achieve
to stabilize the release.

3D features can wait a bit more, even if call for interest, needs,
funding and collaboration is welcome.

Best regards,
Vincent