[HN Gopher] 3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commerc...
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3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)
Author : christigeo
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-02-13 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (80.lv)
(TXT) w3m dump (80.lv)
| elfprince13 wrote:
| I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any
| questions that crop up.
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Do you have a model of the twin towers within it?
| elfprince13 wrote:
| We haven't been ingesting historical datasets that allow us
| to generate them, no.
| samspenc wrote:
| IIRC KitBash [1] is the largest player in this space and has
| photo-realistic models of large environments including San
| Francisco. Are you planning to compete with them head-to-head
| in the same market?
|
| [1] https://kitbash3d.com/
| elfprince13 wrote:
| It looks like their core business model is modular asset
| packs, not necessarily tied to real world environments?
| Potentially some overlap, but I would guess it's unlikely we
| would be going head-to-head with them in most customer use
| cases.
| samstave wrote:
| Have you 3D printed any of the buildings in your data-set?
|
| Specifically bridges, and would it be easy to extract just
| bridges from your set?
| elfprince13 wrote:
| Yes, we generate water-tight meshes for buildings that
| are 3D printable (and terrain can be made 3D printable
| pretty easily). Bridges are one of the weak-points in our
| current reconstruction process - the gnarlier bits of 3D
| road network inference is implemented internally, but
| there's a bit more work to get make the output pretty
| enough to pass through to end-users.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Are the building textures from photos? It looks a lot cleaner
| than I remember NYC being.
| elfprince13 wrote:
| We are doing inverse procedural modeling rather than
| photogrammetry, so there will be some
| idealization/iconification that takes place - but this also
| allows end-users to bring in their own material libraries in a
| pretty seamless way.
| unwind wrote:
| This page [1] gives a bit of an overview of this technique,
| which was new to me:
|
| _Inverse procedural modeling discovers a procedural
| representation of an existing geometric model and the
| discovered procedural model then supports synthesizing new
| similar models._
|
| Not sure what the "discovers" actually means, need to find a
| better reference ... This page [2] summarizes the method like
| this:
|
| _We propose an inverse modeling approach for stochastic
| trees that takes polygonal tree models as input and estimates
| the parameters of a procedural model so that it produces
| trees similar to the input._
|
| So I guess that's roughly the same, then. I still don't quite
| understand it, if you have to manually model a building, and
| then get a procedural model's parameter out of that, you
| still had to model it (=do a lot of work)? Is the benefit
| that you then can store the parameters and use the model to
| regenerate the building, thus compressing the representation
| a bunch?
|
| Cool project anyway, makes me long for NYC! :)
|
| [1]: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/urban/urban-procedural-
| mode...
|
| [2]: https://juliankratt.info/inverse_modeling.php
| elfprince13 wrote:
| Our inverse procedural modeling process produces 3D models
| representing/explaining the structures we see in our input
| sensor data, so it doesn't require hand-modeling first.
|
| > Is the benefit that you then can store the parameters and
| use the model to regenerate the building, thus compressing
| the representation a bunch?
|
| A few benefits - we can automatically generate the mesh
| model at different levels of detail by stripping out
| elements of the procedural recipe (rather than relying on
| mesh decimation which gives ugly results). And yeah,
| compression + error-correction also play a role. Plus
| compared to photogrammetric models, we have the metadata
| needed for interactive lighting/simulation.
| christigeo wrote:
| Digital twin company Geopipe offers a free 3D model of New York
| City, with its real-life buildings, terrain, and streets. You can
| download any part of the city in FBX, OBJ, DAE, GLTF/GLB, and OSG
| formats to use in other software.
|
| To get the customizable and interactive model, you will need to
| create an account, which gives you free credits every month. Use
| the currency to download the city or its districts.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| This needs to be in an Assetto Corsa mod. If I could race around
| a vr NYC with traffic to weave through, I'd be so happy.
| elfprince13 wrote:
| We just hosted a GameJam on itch and.... you definitely aren't
| the only one thinking that: https://itch.io/jam/new-york-new-
| york/entries
| GlenTheEskimo wrote:
| Does it include all boroughs, or just Manhattan?
| elfprince13 wrote:
| all boroughs!
| gonewalkingbrb wrote:
| It'd be fun to have a digital twin of metro Atlanta that allows
| me to customize and visualize what it'd look like if I ripped out
| all the roads and replaced them with grass-tracked trolleys and
| bike trails. Maybe extend The Plane Train from the airport to my
| house.
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(page generated 2023-02-13 23:02 UTC)