Adopt py3dtilers

[EricBoix]

Alas, starting on January 2025, the current Py3dTilers development team will move on to new projects. Py3dTilers will thus no longer be developed nor maintained.
The current repository owners are thus looking for a community (a set of individuals, teams or corporations) that would be willing to adopt py3dTilers in order to pursue the development activity.
This transition could take the form of adding new developers and transmitting the MAINTAINER role (at the repository level).
But, as allowed by the LICENSE, the transmission could go as far as relinquishing the repository ownership to another responsible organization.

At this stage, some contacts were made with some public or private organizations (currently using and/or contributing to py3dTilers). If the future of py3dTilers interests you, and you would willing to engage some resources to take the lead on
maintaining/developing py3dTilers, please provide in this issue some sketchy declaration of intention and possibly a coarse roadmap.

Deciding the actual form of transmission will be based on the result of the public discussion happening in this issue.

[autra]

For those not aware, we started a while ago to collaborate together with the Liris to merge py3dtilers and py3dtiles, so as to integrate all py3dtiles capabilities into the py3dtiles component, avoiding duplication of efforts, and keeping a coherent toolset with many features.
We (=the py3dtiles community) are thus more than willing to take this repository under our umbrella, so that these efforts continues to happen. Current maintainer of py3dtiles are @delhomer (Oslandia), @LorenzoMarnat (Liris, also maintainer of py3dtilers) and myself (Oslandia).

We do not plan on doing big things with the py3dtilers repository, but we can provide some support at least, and ensure a smooth transition to the py3dtiles community repository.

This is a good opportunity for me to remind any reader that the py3dtiles is a true open-source project and a truly open community, and that the maintainer status is given purely on merit. You do not need to belong to either Liris or Oslandia to earn that status. Our governance is openly published.

This is also a perfect opportunity to thank again the Liris for the work done both in py3dtilers and on the py3dtiles community repository, which have been very valuable to the open-source community in general! Among the valuable contributions that have been integrated (or is in the process of being integrated) into Py3dtiles:

• a solid support for b3dm
• improvements on support for the Tileset (and tile) data format
• ifc support through ifcopenshell (initial implementation was started in this repo, and has been the basis for integration into py3dtiles. I am personally grateful, as it helped me a lot in this reintegration work, both in code, example of ifcopenshell integration, and through discussions with @LorenzoMarnat.
• ... and I probably forget a lot of things!

I have been personally very happy to contribute together with @LorenzoMarnat. He has been a skilled and efficient engineer in all the merge requests and reviews done in py3dtiles. Thanks to him!

As a coarse roadmap, here is what we have in mind:

• finishing the reintegration of ifc support
• migrate the LOD support for geometries.
• Integration of pysfcgal, which allows to simplify geometries. This may play nicely with the item above
• (slowly) integrate other formats supported in this repository into py3dtiles
• 3dtiles 1.1 support, then 3DTiles next
• support for instanced geometries

This roadmap is of course non exhaustive, and can include other entities' needs.

We are sad to stop working with the Liris on this subject, but we have been in contact long enough to know this is not the end of our broader collaboration!

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Looking ahead, if you are an individual or organization using or contributing to py3dtilers, you are really welcome to join and contribute to py3dtiles in the future. Do not hesitate to get in touch through comments or issues. Alternatively, you can also fund development. To sponsor either @delhomer's work or mine, you can contact Oslandia ( [email protected] ). Any kind of contribution is appreciated, be it code, documentation, tutorials, funding, communication. We are open and will ever be 🚀