Cenergy3: An open software package for 3D City Energy Modeling

We developed an API to automatically create 3D model for city and energy: Cenergy3. Our current API version integrates the 3D visualisation of terrain, road network, power grid, and building topology. Our API is free.

We have openly released the code behind our API, and we have made the code an open Python library via PyPI that can be easily accessed, see our library at https://github.com/slzhang-git/cenergy or https://pypi.org/project/cenergy/

We also provide a graphic user interface (GUI) that end-users can access our API, regardless of their programming skills and what devices they are using.

A description of this entire open software package, including the released library, API, and the GUI, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.20361 

Below is the GUI for our Cenergy3 API. Our GUI is browser-based and is developed with JavaScript, and you can get 3D models on this webpage directly, without installing or developing any software.

Enter your own OpenTopography API key (free from opentopography.org) and enter the name of the place you want to create 3D model for, then click the request button, and wait to get the 3D model.

NB: Since 2026-04-14, I have reduced the computation resource for the cloud-based API, to reduce cost. Since I have openly released the code and library for the API, I strongly encourage you to use the library, which is greatly intuitive and simple, see here. If you still want to use the API, the area you can request will be quiet limited due to the reduced RAM available to the API.