Welcome to VirtualPlanetBuilder

VirtualPlanetBuilder is terrain database creation tool that is able to read a wide range of geospatial imagery and elevation data and build from small area terrain database to massive whole planet paged databases. These databases can then be uploaded onto the internet and provide online GoogleEarth style roaming of whole planet databases, or kept on local disks for high speed access such as required for professional flight simulators.

VirtualPlanetBuilder just builds databases so for runtime viewing of database you'll need an OpenSceneGraph based application. The VirtualPlanetBuilder itself is based on the OpenSceneGraph real-time graphics toolkit, and creates databases in native OpenSceneGraph binary format for maximum paging performance. For non OpenSceneGraph based applications you'll need to convert the database by writing your own post processing tool to convert from OpenSceneGraph native format into you own native formats, or convert to COLLADA using the OpenSceneGraph native support for reading and writing COLLADA.

The VirtualPlanetBuilder project grew from the original paged database generation tools that can as part of the !OpenSceneGraph-1.2, and is now a separate project to enable both projects to focus on their own core disciplines. We are along way through a rewrite of the internals of VirtualPlanetBuilder to make it far more scalable - making it possible to create multi-terabyte paged databases, and to create them across networks of computers, each of which take part of the job of creating the complete database. We will also provide support for database optimization for the lower bandwidth constraints of web based 3d database visualization. For further details on ongoing developments see the DevelopmentPlans page.

The last stable release 0.9.1, made 16th August 2007 and prior to the recent major changes, can be download as source code .zip archive : VirtualPlanetBuilder-0.9.1.zip or via SVN (subversion) access, to checkout the 0.9.1 release:

svn checkout http://www.openscenegraph.org/svn/VirtualPlanetBuilder/tags/VirtualPlanetBuilder-0.9.1 VirtualPlanetBuilder

Latest developments that include the major rewrite and the rapidly progressing support for clusters and tera-byte builds are available, as a series of developer releases, numbered 0.9.2 onwards, for these you will to to use the latest OpenSceneGraph-2.3.x developer releases of the OpenSceneGraph as well. The developer releases are not yet heavily tested out in the community so may well have problems that 0.9.1 did not, if you are happy testing bleeding edge code then testing and feedback would be most welcome. The latest being developer release 0.9.7 made on the 20th March 2008 as is available as source via .zip archive : VirtualPlanetBuilder-0.9.7.zip or via SVN access and via snv checkout:

svn checkout http://www.openscenegraph.org/svn/VirtualPlanetBuilder/tags/VirtualPlanetBuilder-0.9.7/ VirtualPlanetBuilder

The absolute latest are available form svn trunk:

svn checkout http://www.openscenegraph.org/svn/VirtualPlanetBuilder/trunk VirtualPlanetBuilder

The VirtualPlanetBuilder uses the OpenSceneGraph so to build it you'll first need to download and install the OpenSceneGraph, either version OpenSceneGraph-2.x or Subversion versions should work fine.

To build VirtualPlanetBuilder we use the same build system as OpenSceneGraph so once you've built OpenSceneGraph you should feel at home with the VirtualPlanetBuilder. Under unices one simply does:

  cd VirtualPlanetBuilder
  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

To build under Windows please follow the guidelines for building the OpenSceneGraph VisualStudio guidelines.

To generate database see osgdem user guide page http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/wiki/Support/UserGuides/osgdem.

Robert Osfield, Project Lead, 22nd January 2008.

Version requirements

Different versions of VPB require different versions of OSG to work correctly together.

VPB version		OSG version	Release type
VPB 0.9.1	-->	OSG 2.2	(stable release)
VPB 0.9.7	-->	OSG 2.3.6	(developer release)
VPB in SVN	-->	OSG in SVN	(current development HEAD)