Urban Eye 3D is a JOSM plugin that provides a dedicated 3D view (dockable or floating) to visualize loaded buildings and building parts (building=* and building:part=*).
While 3D visualization of OSM data has existed for years through external tools, the absence of a dedicated 3D viewer in JOSM (particularly since the discontinuation of Kenzi 3D) has been a notable gap.
Urban Eye 3D solves this problem! Mappers and 3D building enthusiasts can now preview their edits directly within JOSM before commiting changes to OpenStreetMap.
- Support for the Simple 3D Buildings specification
- Visualization only – no editing or export functionality
- Intuitive navigation, similar to modern 3D editors:
- Orbit (left mouse drag)
- Zoom (mouse wheel)
- Pan (right mouse drag)
- Basic colour support for
building:colourandroof:colourtags - Two modes: solid and wireframe. Press 'z' to switch between them
- Real-time updates: Changes made in JOSM instantly reflect in the 3D view
See features.md for the list of supported tags and roof shapes.
- Several roof shapes (
mansard,half-hippedandcross_gabled) are supported for quadrilateral polygons only. Support for those roof shapes on arbitrary non-convex polygons may be added in future versions.
Please install Urban Eye 3D just like any other plugin in JOSM:
- In JOSM, open the menu Edit → Preferences, find the Plugins tab.
- If needed, hit the "Download list" button,
- Select the "Available" radio button,
- Type "urba..." in the search field,
- Don’t forget to check the box,
- Enjoy!
As a JOSM plugin written in pure Java, it works perfectly on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some users have reported problems with graphics drivers on certain Linux distributions, but with Linux, you're on your own :)
Inspired by the GNU GPL-licensed Blosm project and following JOSM's plugin licensing recommendations, this code is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
Contributions are welcome! Please discuss significant code changes via issue tickets before submitting pull requests.
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The Urban Eye is watching!
