r.out.vrml(1grass)

💖 r.out.vrml 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the r.out.vrml manual page 🫶 straight out of the GRASS User's Manual. It's the little module with main character energy that takes your raster map and drops it into 3D. Let's gooo ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

r.out.vrml — exports a raster map to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). yes literally, it's giving 3D visualization for your terrain 💅

🎀 KEYWORDS 🎀

raster, export, output, VRML

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

r.out.vrml
r.out.vrml --help
r.out.vrml elevation=name  [color=name]   [exaggeration=float]
output=name  [--overwrite]  [--help]  [--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🦋 Flags:

• --overwrite — lets your output files just go ahead and overwrite files that already exist. no hesitation, no apology 💀
• --help — prints the usage summary so you're not out here guessing.
• --verbose — verbose module output, aka the module tells you everything.
• --quiet — quiet module output. shhh 🤫
• --ui — forces the GUI dialog to launch. main character GUI moment.

💜 Parameters:

• elevation=name [required] — the name of your input elevation raster map. this one is non-negotiable bestie.
• color=name — name of your input color map.
• exaggeration=float — vertical exaggeration. default: 1.0
• output=name [required] — the name for your output VRML file.

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🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

So what does it actually do? This module exports a GRASS raster map into the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) format, for that 3D visualization vibe 👑

Real talk though, this version only outputs raster maps in VRML 1.0 format. The newer VRML 2.0 format would highkey be more efficient for geographic applications, because it introduces an "ElevationGrid" node — meaning only the elevation points have to be written instead of the whole entire geometry. But here's the tea: the vast majority of VRML viewers currently only support VRML 1.0. So. We vibe with what we have. 🙈

Also, if the extension "wrl" (world) is not present in the output parameter, it will be added for you. Little automatic glow-up ✨

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💀 WARNING 💀

not to be dramatic but VRML is not well suited for large geometries, and honestly even a small geographic region can produce those. Most viewers seem to bog down with more than 12,000 polygons, depending on your hardware & specific viewer. brutal.

Here's the math bestie: each grid cell results in two polygons, so a reasonable size region would be something less than about 75x75. 😭

For improved performance and a smaller file size, leave off a color map. And since VRML is ascii text, gzip works very well to significantly compress file size — slay 💅

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📝 NOTES 📝

This is a preliminary release of "r.out.vrml" — so it's still in its soft launch era.

For further information about VRML and available viewers for various platforms, see:

• VRML Virtual Reality Modeling Language

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🐛 BUGS 🐛

Currently the region is transformed to a unit size, so real geographic location is lost. yes, the location said bye 🙈

Side effects when working in a lat-lon project: besides the general distortion due to projection, a very small exaggeration factor (on order of .001) must be used to compensate for vertical units expected to be the same as map units. noted, no cap 📌

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⭐ TODO ⭐

The plan is to update to the more modern GeoVRML format, or probably better, the next generation X3D format. See also the Xj3D project. future era loading… ⏳

Future plans for this module are to allow draping of sites objects and vector maps, and using the new sites format available in floating point GRASS to embed WWW links into site objects. It will also be upgraded to support VRML 2.0 and will allow entering multiple preset "views" using the existing GRASS 3d_view file format. iconic behavior incoming 🫶

Other possible additions:

• Allow animation of elevation, color, or sites based on user interaction.
• Degradation of the raster to produce TINs for improved performance.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Bill Brown, US Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory 🫡

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🔥 SOURCE CODE 🔥

Available at: r.out.vrml source code (history)

Latest change: Friday Apr 17 01:04:26 2026 in commit: 32a143358df26b2e518b03c7e0d79541e8d1e5b1

Main index | Raster index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

© 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual

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and that's the whole page bestie, we ate and left no crumbs 💖 This was r.out.vrml from GRASS 8.5.0 (r.out.vrml(1grass)) — go make something 3D and gorgeous, ily, bye 🎀✨🦋