Getting started

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Overview

What can you do with OpenCities Planner?

OpenCities Planner is a visualization platform for web, mobile and showroom experiences. You can do many things, but primarily it is great for visualizing terrain, reality models and 3D-city models in combination with GIS and design data. Use it for internal project communication in infrastructure projects, or in the zoning process in a city or municipality, or any other use-case where you have big quantities of data that you want to share with people in a user-friendly way.

Have a look at the showcase page for some inspiration.

Registering a user account

A user account represents an individual, and you need one to access the editor interface of OpenCities Planner (OCP) which is where you create projects.

To register a user, click here.

Next, your user has to be associated with an Instance, which represents the OCP subscription, capabilities, and projects. You either get invited to an Instance by the admin of the instance, or you create one yourself and sign up for an OCP subscription.

Creating an Instance

You can create an Instance from the OCP editor, but it has to be activated by the OCP team and you need an active subscription. To create an Instance, go to Instance settings and click Create instance. To contact the OCP team for activation, use the support form or request a price quota.

Configuring users for an Instance

When your Instance has been activated, you can invite other people to projects and datasets that you create and configure. The number of users and their capabilities depends on the Instance subscription level.

Understanding the user interface

The OCP interface consists of two main parts. The Project View and the Editor. The project view is what a public user or a team member sees when a project is shared with them. It is the presentation interface of a project. The content is prepared and configured in the Editor interface. The Editor interface also embeds the project view.

Using Terrain, Reality, and 3D city models

OCP can handle massive terrains, reality models and 3D city models. There are also build in OpenStreetMap and Bing maps which you can use directly for your projects. If you want to upload your own terrain, reality and 3D city models, you do so using the DataManager tool accessible from the Editor.

Supported file formats, services and databases in DataManager

How to:

Preparing content

The project editor supports uploading 3D-models, images, text, documents, vector data, using WMS-services and more. It is important to consider the target audience of your project. If you are preparing a project for public users, then your content needs to be optimized for consuming over the internet and possible to low end devices and computers.

General rules are:

  • Use the quality required to do the job. This means, don’t upload super high resolution images or 3D-models if the additional quality isn’t important. Reduce the quality of your content to fit the purpose.
  • Compress images, but also limit the resolution. Do you need 8k images in your points of interest?
  • Limit the number of triangles used in your 3D-models, compress textures and limit texture resolution. Read more 3D-modelling for OCP

Read more:

Creating, Sharing & Publishing Projects

Projects are created using the Editor interface and can consist of all the content types that OpenCities Planner supports. Each project can include it’s own set of Team members, and can create an individual URL if the project is published.

To create your own Terrain, Reality, and City Models, you use the DataManager tool in the editor interface. Other types of content is uploaded and/or configured using the edit toolbar in the editor interface. A good place to start with understanding how the editor works is the tutorials and the reference pages.

You can share your project internally using the Team feature or you can publish your project for anyone to view and experience.

Read more:

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