A year ago, the idea of creating a plugin capable of generating CityJSON building models directly from QGIS emerged at Oslandia. Thanks to the preliminary work of students from the ENSG and the CP4SC project, we are proud to present version 1.0.0 of CityForge in both English and French!
This first version allows the generation of a CityJSON model directly in QGIS on Windows or other OS like Linux.
For Windows (or for the more adventurous who are not afraid to compile on their machine), we call Geoflow in the background in the form of a pre-downloaded executable. For other OS, we use the Docker image provided by IGN, which must be built beforehand.
The plugin takes a point cloud file (laz/las) and a building footprint (shp or gpkg) as inputs. It is possible to use a layer saved in a directory or a layer present in the QGIS layers.
The plugin manages CRS detection and warns the user if the two files do not share the same CRS.
The plugin offers the creation of CityJSON with all levels of detail (LoD 0.0 to LoD 2.2) or only the most detailed level.
Once the CityJSON is created, it can be viewed in QGIS via the CityJSON loader plugin or in Piero.
The plugin, now available in the QGIS repository, can be installed directly in QGIS from the extension manager. However, the plugin still requires certain dependencies, especially for the installation of Geoflow: all the information is available on the plugin website.
For the future, we have a few ideas 😉
Video Demo
This project is funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU under the France Relance plan.
