2026-05-31 –, Talks room
The City of Ghent publishes its full 3D model, every building, every rooftop, every patch of terrain as open data. I built three things on top of it: a
free-flight viewer of the whole city, a swarm of autonomous drones flocking above it, and a browser tool that crops any region into a 3D-printable slab. All
client-side JavaScript, all open source, all linked together by a Python preprocessing pipeline. Live walkthrough and links:
https://mateovandamme.com/art/flyover-ghent.
The dataset
Stad Gent publishes its full 3D city model: 150+ tiles in Lambert-72, LOD2 buildings from LiDAR fitted to cadastral footprints (GRB), terrain from ground points.
Each building is its own grouped block in the source DWG, not a noisy point cloud, which makes per-building processing trivial (and OSM-friendly).
The pipeline
A short Python toolchain (ODA File Converter, ezdxf, trimesh) turns the raw CAD into static STL tiles. One command, one coffee.
Three projects in the browser
- Fly Over Gent free-flight over the whole city, with direction-aware tile loading and three-tier caching.
- Drones Over Ghent boid flocking above a 3D Ghent, four camera modes, live GUI.
- Print Ghent pick a region on a map, get a watertight 3D-printable STL. No backend, runs entirely in your browser.
Along the way
Coordinate-system pain (Lambert-72 vs WGS84), watertight meshes from leaky CAD, boids in 50 lines, and why client-side beats a backend for this kind of work.
Live page: https://mateovandamme.com/art/flyover-ghent
Previously shown at BYOB 2025 (Nerdlab Ghent).
Also known as 1T.