PlanetX
3D globe for QGIS in the spirit of Google Earth: satellite imagery, terrain, atmosphere, borders, roads and labels, project layers on the globe, My Places, ruler, map synchronization, place search and grab-the-Earth navigation
A 3D globe in its own window inside QGIS. The whole Earth is shown
from space down to single streets, with terrain relief and hill
shading, a glowing atmosphere around the planet and sky at the
horizon. Esri World Imagery opens by default as an example base map.
It can be switched to OpenStreetMap or any XYZ Tiles connection set
up in QGIS.
The Layers panel, as in Google Earth, adds borders, place names,
water names, roads with their numbers, railways, airports, rivers,
lakes, peaks and protected areas from OpenFreeMap vector tiles,
a coordinate grid, stars with the Milky Way and clouds from
NASA GIBS.
Labels stay upright, do not overlap and hide behind mountains and
the horizon. The label language follows QGIS or is chosen from
15 languages and local names.
Layers of the current project, vector and raster, lie on the globe
in the map order of QGIS.
Navigation follows Google Earth. Drag the Earth with the left mouse
button, it keeps rotating by inertia after release. The wheel zooms
to the point under the cursor, the middle button or Shift with the
left button turns and tilts the view. A double click zooms to a
point, the right button zooms, Ctrl looks around, arrows, PageUp,
PageDown, N, U and R work as in Google Earth. The compass ring,
look and move sticks and the height slider appear in the corner of
the view. The globe follows the QGIS map window or leads it, in any
map coordinate system. A click in the Identify mode lists the
features of the project layers under the point and selects them on
the map, selection on the map shows on the globe.
My Places, as in Google Earth, keep placemarks, paths, polygons and
measurements in a shared file of the QGIS profile. They are drawn
by clicks on the globe. The ruler measures lines, paths,
polygons and circles on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Save view puts a
placemark that restores the height, heading and tilt. Tours fly
over My Places and along paths. A snapshot of the view goes to a
file or into a QGIS layout. KML and KMZ open into My Places and a
folder saves back to KML. Places rise above the ground and extend
to it as walls and blocks. Point layers with a time field show as
growing tracks along the QGIS Temporal Controller. A scene saves
the whole view to a file, a tour records to PNG frames.
Type a place name or coordinates in the Search field and the
camera flies there smoothly, the place found gets a red pin.
A PDF manual with pictures in Russian and English opens from the
About window.
Requires OpenGL 3.3 and PyOpenGL, which ships with QGIS on Windows.
Tested on QGIS 3.36 (Qt 5) and 4.0 (Qt 6).
Imagery: Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User
Community. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, vector tiles
OpenFreeMap. Terrain: Mapzen Terrain Tiles (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1
and other sources). Clouds: NASA GIBS, VIIRS. Stars: Yale Bright
Star Catalogue. Milky Way: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio, Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.
Developed with the support of Inform++ LLC (www.informpp.ru).