3D visualization of urban underground pipelines by using SuperMap

For the complicated structure and spatial relationship of urban underground pipelines, it's necessary to employ 3D visualization technology in pipeline management and maintenance. It's not efficient to use 3D modelling software such as 3DS MAX in building a large range scene, and it's difficult and cumbersome to develop the functionalities for 3D visualization of urban underground pipelines from scratch by using the programming APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX3D. In this paper, based on the 3D visualization controls and interfaces by SuperMap, an adaptive method is proposed for building 3D models of urban underground pipeline network. At first, the detailed models of the pipe points and pipe segments are designed by 3DS MAX and imported as map symbols into a SuperMap Symbol library. Then the whole pipeline network is loaded and transformed into a 3D scene by using SuperMap interfaces. Moreover, the 3D models of the ground objects such as buildings are cached in OSGB format, and rendered with underground pipelines to support interactive queries and some professional analysis.