Almost a year after the last release, we are pleased to announce that version 2.3.0 of SFCGAL has been released this summer!
The project is taking another significant step forward with the addition of numerous new features.
What’s new in the v2.3.0 ?
The most significant SFCGAL evolutions are:
- the 3D primitives (cylinder, sphere, box, cube, cylindre, sphère, boîte, cube, cone, torus) ;
- the Nurbscurves, in experimental mode, as a brand new geometric type, SFCGAL now knows some tricks about curves ;
- a big step forward regarding urban planning, with roof generation tools, chamfer and other rounded 3D curves ;
- sfcgalop, a new CLI tool (freely inspired from geosop), this client aims at simplifying the geometry generation for terminal lovers.
SFCGAL Nurbscurve example
An insight from the SFCGALop CLI
This list is not exhaustive, don’t hesitate to have a look at the project CHANGELOG for more details !
SFCGAL and its ecosystem
Significant work on SFCGAL has enabled the library to be integrated as a full-fledged backend in PostGIS. The 3.6 version of PostGIS supports all SFCGAL v2 releases at compile time, including this v2.3.0 release. If you have installed PostGIS with your system package manager, you can take advantage of these new SFCGAL features.
On the PySFCGAL side, support for SFCGAL’s new features is progressing; it’s already possible to take full advantage of primitives or create roof elements in Python!
Conclusion
With this 2.3.0 version, the project reaffirms its ambition to provide a true open-source foundation for 3D geometry and demonstrates its relevance in specific industrial sectors! This blog post gives us another opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to the organizations that have sponsored these new developments (notably the City of Frankfurt and the NlNet R&D Hub): thanks to them, we can gradually build an increasingly comprehensive ecosystem around 3D geometry!
If you think you have a use case that combines 3D, georeferenced data, and geometric processing, please don’t hesitate to contact us at infos@oslandia.com—SFCGAL might just be the building block you’re missing!
