I joined OSM 11 years ago. My area was poorly mapped. I thought I’d get cracking on the streets, but didn’t.

eventually I returned and got into mapping of buildings and other features. I started on adding addresses to all the properties in Copmanthorpe. This entailed redrawing the vast majority of buildings, many of which had been draw as one building when in fact they were many.

I concentrated in the areas I was most familiar with. And when I was canvassing before elections, I’d return to the map and add the address of the streets I’d cover.

I’d complete halfish of the suburb.

Then I came across 3D buildings. Intrigued, I set about learning how to “draw” houses. Mainly woking on properties I’d previously mapped, I built-up skills and faster techniques.

I decided to map the all the main block of Copmanthorpe. Over 1500 properties. Improved the drawing off all, complete all the addresses and make the all 3D.

Today, 10 days later I completed it. It’s here on OSM Buildings

I also added a ton of other features along the way. Not being buildings, they don’t feature on OSM Buildings. They do appear on F4map

However, f4map doesn’t seem so keen on using the latest updates, so I get a random selection of old and new mapping. I guess that will improve with time.

The next stage is to revisit the area. There are a lot of garages that could still be added, and over 1000 gardens, if I can be bothered. I also want to improve my building with multi part buildings. I haven’t got my head around that yet. Working with small buildings appears to be the problem.

I recently came across Simple 3D Buildings and thought I’d have a go with some of housing on my street.

The documentation is thin so the learning curve is steep. I’ve installed the Kendzi3d plugin to JOSM which is helpful. Getting a view of what you have mapped is difficult because the data refreshes of OSM Buildings and F4map are few and far between. The Kendzi3d viewer enables confirmation of details on a single building, but I’ve not used it for whole streets or housing estates.

Working with parts of buildings in difficult. I’m not sure how to override the default settings for buildings. One suggestion was to leave all 3D data out of the main building and only include that in the Building Part. Working this way the rendering engine still draws the default white block for the building type and can completely hind the Building Parts. I’m working though some ideas on how best to get round this issue.

Got obsessed by Land use this week. Working on changeling large areas of residential land use into smaller blocks. Stepping down in granularity I’m now excluding footpaths and roads.

In the last month I’ve started using JOSM. Big learning curve for me. Currently finding it useful for adding address to houses and resequencing Cycle Routes.

Decided to sign up to Open Street Map. I plan to do some editting of Copamnthorpe, York. I live and work here, so I should be able to add some useful information.