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Introduction
The ga-worldwind-suite is a collection of tools created by the Geoscience Australia (GA) Movies and 3D Visualisation (M3DV) team. The tools are built around the NASA World Wind Java SDK, an open-source virtual globe toolkit.
Development on the tool suite began in 2009 with the goal to create a product to allow Geoscience Australia to publish a number of Australia's national geophysical datasets. Since the initial product release, development has continued on the tool suite and it is now mature and stable; boasting a number of powerful features targeted at geoscience data. The codebase for this tool suite was released as open source in 2012.
The following is a brief introduction to each project in the suite. Additional information for each tool can be found on it's own Wiki page, or in the README file contained in the tool source code.
The Viewer was the initial tool in the suite. It was created to publish GA's national datasets. The Viewer project is a virtual globe tool that gives users access to raster, vector and 3D datasets in the context of a 3D globe. The surface geometry of the 3D globe is controlled by digital elevation models (DEMs), and subsurface data can be viewed in-situ below the globe's surface.
Features:
- Support for raster and vector (shapefile) data
- Support for custom Digital Elevation Model (DEMs)
- Native support for GOCAD data (tsurf, gsurf, sgrid, voxet, pline)
- Support for subsurface datasets
- Customisable "Dataset" and "Theme" configuration
- Support for standalone "offline" data packages
A publicly available product based on this project is available through the GA website.
The Animator is a keyframe based animation tool which is used to produce flythrough-style animations of geoscience data. This tool has been used internally by the M3DV team to produce animations for use in promotional and educational activities.
Features:
- Support for the full range of datasets available in the
Viewer - Keyframe-based animation tools familiar to 3D animators
- Bezier and Linear curve editing tools to give fine-grained control over animation parameters
The Common project is a library containing code shared by the Animator and Viewer projects. It is a dependency for both of these projects and contains general-purpose code that could be included in other projects based on the NASA World Wind SDK.
Features:
- General-purpose extensions to the NASA World Wind SDK
The Tiler is used to prepare tilesets for use by the Viewer and Animator tools, or indeed any tool that can consume tiles from a NASA World Wind tileset.
Features:
- Generate tilesets from any raster data supported by GDAL
- Generate tilesets from any mapnik styled vector data
- Preview generated tilesets without having to create a layer definition file
- Fine-tune tileset output (number of levels, tile size etc.)
The TileServer is a simple JSP application that can be used to serve World Wind tilesets from a webserver. The server is fully World Wind compliant, and contains a number of additional features used by the Viewer project.
Features:
- Very simple (the server consists of 3 files)
- Fully compliant with the NASA World Wind tile request format
- Fast