- the most widely used GIS package
- Terrex has done work on some integration of ArcView with their terrain software
- ArcView is usually sold through dealers / resellers
- ArcView has an add-in called
3D
Analyst
- claims a great deal of "virtual terrain" abilities, even realtime flythroughs!
- $2500 list price, not necessarily sold by all ESRI resellers
- well-written 3D Analyst whitepaper
- uses OpenGL
- ongoing evaluation of 3D Analyst
- the leading competitor to ESRI
- some 3D possibilities exist with third-party product
Vertical Mapper (~$1200)
- from the marketing literature it doesn't sound as impressive as 3D Analyst, would be nice to evaluate anyway
Maptitude
($500)
- a lower-cost alternative to the "big two", has all the usual 2D GIS functionality
- as of version 4.5, it has some 3D support including the ability to turn contours into a heightfield and do a flyover
- "Drape a map over a surface to see the map in three dimensions and control the display of 3-D maps with the new 3D Toolbox."
- claims to calculate spot heights, viewsheds, shortest path over terrain
- A very low-cost GIS package that claims to have all the same features as the other more expensive tools, e.g. ArcView and MapInfo
- consists of a large suite of products, "3D visualization is a built-in part of every Manifold edition"
- a freeware GIS (Windows only) once with an emphasis on forestry, but now a general-purpose GIS
- supports a huge number of raster and vectors formats
- hasn't gotten much attention to date, but looks great for a wide variety of common GIS tasks
- an open-source GIS application which handles more types of data than ArcView: "raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality"
- includes some 2.5D and 3D visualization capabilities
- unfortunately, it is heavily Unix oriented, and the Win32 version is still "experimental" - as of November 2004, after several hours of effort, i did not manage to get it to open any dataset.
- for those who do manage to get GRASS working, there is an
interesting module NVIZ with
some virtual terrain capabilities:
- "NVIZ allows users to realistically render multiple surfaces in a 3D space, optionally using thematic coloring, draping GRASS vector files over the surfaces, and displaying GRASS site files either draped on the surfaces or as 3D point locations."
- an open-source GIS application with an emphasis on grid and raster functions: digital terrain analysis, geo-statistics, image processing
- imports all of the GDAL formats, exports ArcGrid and Surfer
- exposes an API so that people can easily add modules to it
Some web mapping engines start to resemble 3D rendering
(non-realtime) such as the amazing Tourism View of Oakville [oakvillegis.ca,
2003, no longer online]