OSM Quick 3D
Plugin ID: 5376
One-click OpenStreetMap into native QGIS: function-styled vector layers plus flat-roof 3D building massing on a selectable study-area shape (rectangle, rounded rectangle, circle, hexagon or your own selected polygon), with selectable map themes, an optional recessed base and a basemap underlay.
(2) votes
OSM Quick 3D is a fast, native companion to the browser-based 3D OSM Model plugin. Pick the visible map area (or the extent of your selected features) and a study-area shape — rectangle, rounded rectangle, circle, hexagon, or your own selected polygon — and the plugin downloads OpenStreetMap buildings, roads, cycleways, waterways, greens, trees and street furniture straight into QGIS as memory layers, already styled by function: buildings coloured by OSM use, roads by highway class and metric width, water blue, greens green. The buildings are then extruded with QGIS's own 3D symbology into a clean flat-roof massing model whose height comes from OSM (tagged height, else floor count, else a sensible default), so it shows directly in a QGIS 3D Map View with no browser and no web server. Building colours are selectable and applied identically in 2D and 3D: by OSM function, or a soft height-graduated tint (gray, warm, teal, salmon, purple or sand), with multiple map themes for different cartographic looks. An optional height-exaggeration factor makes low-rise districts read in the 3D view, and trees get a matching 3D pass as simple green canopies. The city stands on an optional recessed ground base (the study area buffered outward by 5 m, extruded as a plinth from 2 m below up to ground level), tinted to harmonise with the chosen building colours. Every downloaded layer lands inside one tidy layer-tree group, an optional basemap layer is moved under the city to act as the ground, and the whole result can optionally be saved to a single GeoPackage so it survives a project reload instead of vanishing as a memory layer. The Theme & Style dock controls the native 3D scene, including per-layer visibility in 3D without hiding those layers from the 2D map. Buildings and roads can optionally be labelled by their OSM name with a white halo. Each building also carries a computed footprint area and an estimated gross floor area (footprint times floors) as real columns, and the run reports the area totals, so the output is ready for quick planning quantities. Overpass responses are cached on disk for a week, so re-running on the same area opens instantly without hitting the rate-limited public API again. Because the output is plain native layers, it scales to far larger areas than a web 3D scene; the practical limit is the public Overpass API. Built at Dokuz Eylul University, Department of City and Regional Planning.
