val3dity---pronounced 'val-three-dity'---allows us to validate 3D primitives according to the international standard ISO19107. Think of it as PostGIS ST_IsValid, but for 3D primitives (PostGIS only validates 2D primitives).
In short, it verifies whether a 3D primitive respects the definition as given in ISO 19107 and GML.
The validation of the following 3D primitives is fully supported:
MultiSurfaceCompositeSurfaceSolidMultiSolidCompositeSolid
Unlike many other validation tools in 3D GIS, inner rings in polygons/surfaces are supported and so are cavities in solids (also called voids or inner shells). However, as is the case for many formats used in practice, only planar and linear primitives are allowed: no curves or spheres or other parametrically-modelled primitives are supported. There is no plan to support these geometries.
val3dity accepts as input:
- GML files of any flavour
- CityJSON
- CityGML (v1 & v2 only; v3 will not be supported)
- IndoorGML
- OBJ
- OFF
For the City/JSON/GML and IndoorGML formats, extra validations (specific to the format) are performed, eg the overlap between different parts of a building, or the validation of the navigation graph in IndoorGML.
val3dity is a command-line interface (CLI) programme only, with several options.
No demo visible here? View it on asciinema.
If you don't want to go through the troubles of compiling and/or installing val3dity, we suggest you use the web application. Simply upload your file to our server and get a validation report back. We delete the file as soon as it has been validated (promised!). However, a file is limited to 50MB.
The simplest, if you have Homebrew, is:
$ brew tap tudelft3d/software
$ brew install val3dity
You can also get the code here, and compile it yourself. You first need to install the following free libraries:
Under macOS, it's super easy, we suggest using Homebrew:
$ brew install cgal
$ brew install eigen
$ brew install geos
$ brew install cmake
and then
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
Under Linux (at least Ubuntu), CGAL has to be compiled because apt-get doesn't give you a version with Eigen. Thus, in a nutshell,
- install Eigen library:
$ sudo apt install libeigen3-dev - install GEOS library:
$ sudo apt install libgeos++-dev - install CGAL:
$ sudo apt-get install libcgal-dev- if it's not CGAL5 that is installed, download latest CGAL code and unzip somewhere - setCGAL_DIRto that folder, egexport CGAL_DIR=/home/hledoux/software/CGAL-5.0.2, this will tell your shell to use that version of CGAL (thus more version of CGAL can be installed on the same computer; see that handy manual)
For Windows, we offer an executable, although it's also possible to compile val3dity yourself, see the Visual Studio project in the folder vs_build.
To compile and run val3dity (from the val3dity folder):
$ ./val3dity /data/cityjson/cube.json
The summary of the validation is reported, and you should see that cube.json contains one valid primitive.
Finally, to see all the options possible:
$ ./val3dity --help
To verify that everything went fine during the compilation, run the unit tests (from the root folder of val3dity) (this requires pip install pytest pyyaml):
$ python -m pytest --runfull
You shouldn't get any errors.
To run val3dity over Docker simply execute:
$ docker run --rm -v <local path where your files are>:/data tudelft3d/val3dity:<tag> <name of the dedicated file>
Where <tag> is docker image tag from https://hub.docker.com/r/tudelft3d/val3dity/tags
If you are using the --report option, then keep in mind that <local path where your files are> need to be writable by any user, otherwise your output won't be saved.
Read the full documentation at https://val3dity.rtfd.io.
The primary channel to communicate with the developers is the Issues section.
If you have a question or came across a bug, please submit an issue there. However we ask you check first whether your problem has already been solved by someone else.
Ledoux, Hugo (2019). val3dity: validation of 3D GIS primitives according to the international standards. Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards, 3(1), 2018, pp.1 [DOI]
Ledoux, Hugo (2013). On the validation of solids represented with the international standards for geographic information. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 28(9):693-706. [PDF] [DOI]
