azul

azul is a 3D city model viewer It is intended for viewing 3D city models in CityGML 1.0 and 2.0, CityJSON 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 (including CityJSON Text Sequences), IndoorGML, OBJ, OFF and POLY. It supports loading multiple files, selecting objects by clicking them or selecting them in the sidebar, toggling the visibility of individual items, and browsing their attributes. It is research software, but it is pretty stable and most datasets already work without problems. It is available under the GPLv3 licence.

The current version of azul is for macOS 14 and higher and supports both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Controls

• Pan: scroll

• Rotate: drag on (left) click, rotate on trackpad

• Zoom: pinch on trackpad, drag on right click

• Select: click on object (in view or sidebar)

• Centre view: double click (in view or sidebar object), h or cmd+shift+h (to dataset centre)

• New file (clear view): n or cmd+n

• Open file (import): o or cmd+o

• Load view (camera) parameters: l or cmd+l

• Save view (camera) parameters: s or cmd+s

• Copy selected object ids: c or cmd+c

• Find objects: f or cmd+f

• Show bounding box: b or cmd+shift+b

• Show edges: e or cmd+shift+e

• Show sidebar: cmd+ctrl+s

• Go full screen: cmd+ctrl+f

• Close window (quits): cmd+w

• Quit: cmd+q

Download

You can download the latest stable release of azul in the releases page or from the App Store. If you want more information on how to compile it from source, see below.

Technical details

azul is written in a mix of C++17, Swift 5, Objective-C 2 and Objective-C++. The core is written in C++ for future portability, but it uses Apple's Metal for visualisation and SIMD for fast vector/matrix computations. It uses pugixml to parse XML, simdjson to parse JSON, and the CGAL Triangulation package to triangulate concave polygons for display.

Not implemented / ideas for the future

• Removing (unloading) files
• Icons for missing types
• Better handling of big coordinates
• Improved search with live viewing of matching objects
• Reordering hierarchies in sidebar
• Way to navigate xlinks / implicit parent-child relationships
• Use status bar to indicate actions, success/failure
• Customising colours, more complex materials
• Materials and textures (loaded from files)
• Shifting the rotation point out of the data plane
• Using a rotation point at a visible object in the centre (good for zooming in and rotating)
• Showing the data plane and rotation point
• Animations when re-centering
• Keyboard navigation
• Multi-threaded file loading and ray shooting
• QuickLook plug-in
• Icon previews
• iOS support

Compilation

We have included an Xcode 15 project to easily compile azul. It should be possible to compile azul on older macOS versions (from 10.14 onwards), but old versions of Xcode (older than 10) cannot compile Swift 5.

azul depends on the following libraries: Boost, CGAL, GMP, MPFR, pugixml and simdjson. Most of these can be easily obtained using Homebrew, but we provide fat libraries (arm64 + x86_64) of them all for convenience.

Licence

azul is available under the GPLv3 licence.