Visual editor

As you can see in current release of Kendzi3d I added some very basic editor capabilities. It is not working perfect yet. Currently you can only select and edit height of simple buildings. To do it you need to target green dot on building selection. It is obvious that current editor need to be heavily improved. I’m interested on idea how this editor should looks like. What objects and properties should be editable. Maybe someone can prepare of some mock for UI? So if you have some ideas please write them down.

Have you ever used Sketchup? It has a very powerful but intuitive editor which I think would be a great source of inspiration. In particular, it has a nice way of solving the problem of figuring out where in 3D space the mouse pointer is (in 2D space) by “snapping” you to a set of axes and showing you which way you need to move if you want to go “back” rather than “sideways”.

The holy grail for editing buildings in 3D for me would be to be able to place a photograph on the model in the editor, rotate and scale it (so the footprints match) and then scale the height, roof shape etc… In Sketchup they call this “Photo Match”. Here is a tutorial: http://support.google.com/sketchup/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94920
There are also videos on Youtube if you don’t want to run the software yourself.

Sketchup is really nice application. But it is designed for creating real models with faces and triangles. I don’t thing osm is place where we should put 3d models. Currently we have only simple 3D or 2,5D. So we can edit some basic attributes like height or number of levels. First I would like to make simple editor for “Simple 3D Buildings” tagging schema. I think “Photo Match” should not be a priority, or am I wrong?

there was a tool called Google building maker. I have tried it some weeks ago and it was pretty easy to create a 3D model of a building but not so detailed as in Sketchup. Unfortunately it was sunset. Just make a Google image search. Maybe it gives you some ideas