3D Buildings in 2D

This example is based on the workspace sent to us by Laimonas Liskauskas working for HNIT-BALTIC, Vilnius, Lithuania.

It allows to show features in 3D-like perspective look in 2D environments:

The image above shows the building layer taken from Vancouver Open Data web site in Bing Maps.

Note that Google Maps has its own layer of such buildings for some cities, including Vancouver.

The workspace that achieves such an effect looks as follows:

The key part here is the 3DAffiner transformer applied to building sides that were created within Chopper and Extruder - 3DAffiner distorts sides in the way that gives perspective look. Building tops are simply offset along Y axis for a half of the building heights.

Bing Maps and Google Maps are the excellent destinations for such an effect. Click on the attached Vancouver.htm or Gavle.htm examples to see how it works in Bing Maps.

Preparing tiles for Bing Maps requires several extra steps, which are not the part of this article. Check Rasterization for Web Mapping Platforms(Article#: 000001542) for more details. Download the workspace for generating tiles and the source shapefile.

Adobe Geospatial PDF seems to be another natural destination for this effect:



The attached Vancouver25D_PDF.fmw workspace shows buildings with 3D effect and several other layers from Vancouver Open Data web site in 2D. You may want to check the part that deals with street labelling although its contents is out of the scope of this article. The source dataset for making PDF is attached below. Click the 3DBuildings.pdf attachment to see the output in Adobe Reader.