FME Provides Access to Full 3D Cityscapes within..

28 October 2009, 9:40am

FME Provides Access to Full 3D Cityscapes
within ESRI ArcGIS

Safe Software today announced that FME®, the leading spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) solution, now provides ESRI® users with access to full 3D cityscapes directly within their ESRI ArcGIS® environment. ESRI users can now develop more realistic visualizations in a fraction of the time, helping them deliver more valuable business insights to decision makers.

Safe Software has achieved this by adding support in FME for 3D data textures and additional 3D formats including Autodesk® 3ds, Autodesk Civil 3D®, Google™ Sketchup™ and Collada. Safe has also enhanced FME to be capable of creating Geodatabases with attributes and textures on 3D objects, and has designed FME to extend the browsing capabilities of ArcCatalog®, enabling users to view textured 3D objects without having to import data.

ESRI users can now leverage 3D data from a wide variety of sources – whether the data has been custom-designed in 3D authoring environments, purchased from data providers or collected free from 3D warehouses – and then import or view the 3D data directly in ArcGIS for use in enriched visualizations and analysis.

"We can now meet the pressure to share our 3D city with everyone," says Eddie Larsson, GIS Manager at the City of Gävle, Sweden. "By using FME, we can now keep our full cityscape in our ESRI environment and share it out in the formats people ask for, such as KML. Safe Software has helped us put a very realistic Gävle on the map - our famous Yule Goat and all."

Designed in partnership with ESRI, who has announced their plan to add 3D editing and routing tools to the ArcGIS 9.4 release, this development culminates two years of collaboration to deliver improved 3D interoperability to ESRI users.

"We are very excited to see the vision we had over two years ago coming through to reality," says Dale Lutz, Vice President of Development at Safe Software. "This newest development is a giant step forward in enabling the GIS market to work with the 3D data they want to access to enhance their business intelligence."

Organizations interested in seeing how FME enables quick direct-view and importing capabilities for 3D data in ESRI ArcGIS can access the FME 2010 beta at www.safe.com/Beta or visit www.safe.com/Gavle to learn more.

www.safe.com

FME 2010 beta

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