A Base Map, or a 2D reference map, has been omnipresent for long.  You may be only interested in the point cloud, or the spherical or oblique image, but showing you point of view on a reference map is quite useful.  So we’ve been supporting that from day one, and have now introduced a bit more flexibility and ease of access.

First of all, we’ve put a few Base Maps available from free third party services at your finger tops : in the Viewer, open the Catalog and select Base Maps from the menu.  There’s a list of System base maps that we’ve integrated for you.  And we’ll be adding more over time.

Secondly, any base map you upload, and is tagged as base map, will appear in the same listing, be it under your own list of base maps.

And third and coolest new feature : base maps are of course visualised in the 2D portion of the Viewer, but now also in any 3D view.  Just switch on the Global Setting in the Resources sidebar.  Works for any base map.

Top image shows a base map in 3D combined with a city wide point cloud colorised by height.