 Hello, welcome back to my YouTube channel. In this video I'm going to introduce a new QGIS feature on 3D tiles. This amazing new feature was developed by North Road and Lutra Consulting who were awarded a grant from Cesium to introduce 3D tile support in QGIS. This feature is available from version 3.34 Prisren. What are 3D tiles? 3D tiles are a standard and OGC community standard for streaming and rendering large-scale 3D spatial datasets. They use a hierarchical structure to efficiently manage and display 3D content, optimizing performance by dynamically loading appropriate levels of detail. In that way it's very similar to vector tiles. Currently QGIS only supports the Cesium 1.0 format fully and parts of the Cesium 1.1 format. And why is this so useful to having QGIS? It's because it is another great spatial data source and many countries are developing digital twins and provide data in this format. And therefore it's also great to use as a 3D base map in the 3D view when you want to combine it with other spatial data and other 3D spatial data. So let's have a look at how we can add these layers to QGIS. From QGIS 3.34 you will find in the browser panel the scenes folder where all your 3D tiles will be shown. You can easily add the 3D tile using the data source manager and then go to scene. You can add as a source type a local file and then you need to look for tileset.json files or you can link to a service on the web and that's what we're going to do here. You can find 3D tiles on the web and this website shows examples for the Netherlands and I'm going to add 3D tiles for part of Rotterdam. Simply right click on the link and copy the link. Back in QGIS click new to create a new season 3D tiles connection. Give it a name, here I just call it Rotterdam and then I paste the URL. Click OK and click add and then the 3D tile will be added to your QGIS map canvas. Now we can clearly see the mesh structure of the buildings in this 3D tile. Just to be sure that I'm in the correct location I also add an XYZ tile from OpenStreetMap and overlay this with the 3D tile and you see it fits. I'm just going to adjust the projection to the projection of the Netherlands. Let's have a look at the layer styling panel. The 3D tiles for now only have the textured and wireframe renderers. If we go to wireframe I can have a look at the mesh which has been flattened to 2D but I can see here the faces of the mesh. I can check the box to use texture colors but this layer doesn't have colors in the texture so that doesn't do much but you will see later what that does. Let's have a look in the 3D view. Let's maximize the view and have a look at the 3D buildings and here they show up. The behavior is very similar to other data sources that we could already use in the 3D view such as point clouds or 3D shapes and I can use similar settings. For example I can use idome, lightning or show ambient occlusion or drop the shadows. I can also use the 3D measurement tool to measure 3D distances between objects. Let's say from this rooftop to the next building and there it gives me the 3D distance. In a similar way I can measure the height of a building. Here you see that I'm not straight so I'm going to do this again. There we have the height. So that was a very simple example. Now let's have a look at a more impressive example and therefore I'm going to install the new cesium-ion plugin. Cesium-ion is a cloud-based platform for managing and streaming 3D geospatial data and with this plugin we can use it in QGIS but you first need to configure it and you need to have an account and a token but that will be automatically linked, it will be stored at the level of your project. So when you share your project others can use your token and don't need to bother about it. So when I first click there on cesium-ion it will open this page where I need to give permissions for QGIS to use this service and that's done now. So here under cesium-ion in the browser panel I see two layers. You can also add other layers to the service but by default these two layers will be there. Now let's have a look at the Google photo realistic 3D tiles. Before I load that I'm going to set the boundaries of this project by going to project and in the properties I go to view settings because these datasets are huge I'm going to limit the extent to the map canvas extent. We can easily check that when I zoom in and then I zoom to the extent you see that we are zooming to the extent that we have set. Another thing that we need to do for these big datasets is to increase the network cache. So under settings options you will find network and there you should make it at least 1 GB. So I'm just going to add a zero there. And now I'm going to load the layer and you can use the existing default token and then depending on your internet speed it will load and it will load quite quickly because it uses these tiles with different zoom levels and when I zoom in it has to load more detailed tiles and there it comes. Now that's in 2D the effect of using these 3D tiles that we see more detail when we zoom in and this can be visualized also through the wireframe. So different zoom levels show different degree of meshing here and when it updates you see that the further we zoom in the more faces of these meshes will show up. Here it also makes sense to use the texture colors which gives the average color of the texture to the wireframe to fill the faces and it gives a nice mosaic here. At the bottom you also see maximum error. We can lower that and then it will have more details visualized but will be a higher load on your network. So I keep it at the default maximum error of 3. I'm going to add a new 3D map and maximize it. To use most of the screen I'm also going to hide the compass and let's fly around a bit. I zoom in and then I'm going to look at it in perspective and there we see these beautiful buildings from the tiles dataset on the Google photo realistic dataset and here we get a warning that our video memory is already limiting this. So you need a good graphics card with a lot of memory and of course it works smoother for smaller areas but this goes quite well, center of Rotterdam and you see how detailed everything is in this 3D tile dataset which is freely accessible. I hope you've enjoyed this video, I will add some additional resources in the description of this video and please subscribe if you want to receive updates. We look forward to see you next time.