We are very excited that the globe view has landed in QGIS 3.44. Funded by a Cesium Ecosystem Grant, and developed jointly by Lutra Consulting and North Road, this has been a challenging and fun project to work on.
If you would like to try it: open a project in QGIS, then use menu View > 3D Map Views > New 3D Globe View - a new window with a globe should appear. For example, if you have a project with OpenStreetMap raster layer, you should see something like this:
The globe will use your 2D map as the texture, and as you zoom closer, the globe will get more detailed textures. In this initial release, tiled scene layers and point cloud layers are supported as 3D layers, meaning that you can use 3D Tiles datasets. Here’s a demo with Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles:
Pro-tip: if you use Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, make sure to disable rendering of the terrain in the configuration of your 3D view - this is because the dataset contains terrain itself and may cause flickering (“Z fighting”) with the terrain provided by QGIS.
A major challenge has been to make things work well whether you are looking at the whole planet or if you are zoomed in to look at a single building. Why? GPUs that are used for 3D rendering generally work with single precision floating point numbers, but these do not have enough precision for planet-wide data - common formats for geographical data use double precision floating point numbers. What looks like a minor technical detail is actually really important - and in previous versions of QGIS, 3D scenes that are larger than 50-100 km would experience numerical issues, causing jitter and incorrect camera behavior - here’s an example:
Because of that, we had to do some math tricks so that GPUs can still happily work with single precision numbers, and yet we keep the precision we need even for large scenes. The same scene as above, but in QGIS 3.44 works smoothly:
If you are interested in reading more about the math tricks, please check out the related QGIS Enhancement Proposal that covers all the details.
We are running a crowdfunding campaign together with North Road to further enhance QGIS 3D for digital twins - we are planning lots of exciting features, including support for vector data in the globe view! Please check out the campaign, help us spread the word, and if you have an opportunity, we would love to see your contribution to the campaign - the campaign closes at the end of June!
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Lutra Consulting is a QGIS-focused expert provider of geospatial software development, consulting, training, and support services.
