3D City Modelling

3D city models, as digital representations of urban areas, can be used to facilitate many applications, such as urban wind and dispersion simulations, energy studies, noise studies and various types of analysis that require a planned architectural design to be placed in its context (line of sight and shadow analysis, clash detection with cables and pipelines in the underground, impact of wind circulation, etc.). These 3D models, which also contain semantics, are different from 3D meshes (as found in computer graphics and the gaming world) and from raw point clouds. These can be used for visualization and visual analysis, but they are not suitable for most other spatial analysis purposes.