3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use) | Hacker News Reader

3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)

80.lv

108 pointschristigeo26 comments

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.

I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any questions that crop up.

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/

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.

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?

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.

I have an idea ;

When I traveled to Japan for work often, I got a puzzle set of all major land bodies that fit into a plastic-slotted-type map of the oceans, so a child woul learn the continents... (All three of my kids are really good at geography because of that puzzle I got.)

But it also had subsets of more complex and smaller-as-you-go pieces such that instead of just "Europe" it waould break down into the individual countries that made up 'europe, scandinavia, asia' etc...

would be cool to be able to print out "times square" 'Harlem' etc as individual sets... and construct a "manhatten island" place by place....

Also, Fun Fact, Golden Gate Park in SF is larger than Central Park in NYC.

Other Idea ; make each model with a QR code on it in relief/raise such that when you print it out, it points to the WIKI page of said famous building....

EDIT:

Oh and if you do this, and you use tiny url you can link the QR codes to the tiny and then be ab;e to use the geocodes for scanning to show you where in the worl the IP is scanning your links to understand the geo traffic from 'thing'

I did this on cannabis labels I designed for a company such that if they had a product scanned, linking them to lab results for cannabis products, it will show where the dispensaries were where customers were scanning / following them from...

it was pretty slick...

Very interesting idea, although one potential concern, depending on implementation, is that a lot of landmarks are copyrighted in a way s.t. you can include them in maps of a larger area, but you can't provide them standalone (or advertise using their names).

My personal philos ;

If I can see it. With thine owns eyes.

Then I am free to do with whatever I want with that which I can clearly see with mine own eyes.

Specifically if I am standing on 'public' property...

So if it requires me to traverse private ; its yours.

If I can see it from public ; its open source.

Fin.

Do you have a model of the twin towers within it?

We haven't been ingesting historical datasets that allow us to generate them, no.

Can I use them in Roblox? My daughter loves to play with it and Roblox Studio, and having more assets to use (buildings and pre-built places she could modify) would be awesome.

There are some limitations with getting big mesh models into Roblox but it's definitely possible - I'll ask if my engineer who's been working on testing that if he has recommendations.

Yep! We've been testing it out ourselves and Roblox does a great job at importing our models. There are a few quirks (Roblox can't perfectly handle our trees and Subway entrances), but I'm sure your daughter will have a lot of fun with them. My one piece of advice is to start small when downloading areas and slowly move your way up in size because Roblox is not always able to process larger models.

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.

We're planning the list for our next 10 or so cities! =)

Does it include all boroughs, or just Manhattan?

all boroughs!

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.

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

Are the building textures from photos? It looks a lot cleaner than I remember NYC being.

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.

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

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.

this is really cool work. do you guys have any white papers that describe your technical approach?

Thanks! And no - we don't have whitepapers, but if you want to get a sense of our philosophical influences, I point to Daniel Ritchie (a prof at Brown)'s publications as he's one of our scientific advisers, although you'll have to fill in the gaps a bit as his work is mostly not specific to geospatial applications.

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