OpenStreetMap buildings

Work in progress This article or section will be worked on in the upcoming hours or days. See history for the latest developments.

OSM generated buildings and roads.

Buildings can be mapped in OpenStreetMap. Their shapes can be turned into 3D models for use in FlightGear scenery.

Note for Windows

Windows does not contain perl by default. You're advised to install Strawberry Perl for Windows. It is a simple installer; no need to dig into your system.

Cygwin is also advised, so "grep" can be used to get a list of building ids easily.

A single building

1. Find the building in OpenStreetMap.
2. Enable the "Data" overlay.
3. Choose a manual area and drag a box around your building.
4. Click your building, the way id will be shown. Copy this id.
5. Run the following code, replacing 44338398 with your building's id:

perl bob.pl -w 44338398

Next to this basic code, there are several options, to be added behind the basic code.

• Lat/lon location of the model's origin:

-lat 52.00141 -lon 4.36966

• Object name (not the .ac name!):

-n "Empire State Building"

• Building height (in meters):

-h 15

Note: buildings are always sunk 5 m into the ground, in order to account for non-flat terrain.

All buildings in an area

1. Download a file with all data from the area, by visiting the following link and save it somewhere on your computer. This will only include buildings (building=yes) within the specified bounding box.

   http://overpass-api.de/api/xapi?way[bbox=left,bottom,right,top][building=*][@meta]

   http://overpass-api.de/api/xapi?way[bbox=-74.02037,40.69704,-73.96922,40.73971][building=*][@meta]

2. Get a list of wayids via grep "<way" map.osm|cut -f2 -d\">file.txt
3. Run perl bob.pl -w $object -f map.osm on all the ids.