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I have just started playing around with my first GIS package, QGIS. I have successfully used Ordnance Survey Vector data to create maps but when I try importing maps from an OpenStreetMap export it always gives me a birds eye view. Any idea how I can get it to produce an Aerial view?

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What are your exceptions between Aerial view and Birds Eye View - are they not the same? – Mapperz♦ Jul 31 '12 at 19:54
What I call birds eye view is where you are not looking vertically down on the map but at something like 30 deg from vertical. Aerial is what I call looking vertically down on a map. Does that make sense? – Peter Cornelissen Jul 31 '12 at 22:59
Officially it is called oblique aerial photography in the GIS world - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_photography#Oblique_photographs – Mapperz♦ Aug 1 '12 at 13:08

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Just guessing: You have not set any coordinate reference system for your project.

The Openstreetmap Data is in lat/lon coordinates, so should be CRS WGS84 EPSG:4326 as layer projection, which looks somewhat twisted in most parts of the world. To have the same view as in OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, use CRS EPSG:900913 or 3857 for the project, and check "On-the-fly-projection".

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I think this was the solution. It looks like setting the option to 'On the fly projection' did the trick. It is doing what I wanted now anyway, thanks. – Peter Cornelissen Aug 1 '12 at 13:23
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OSM 3D can be created but you will need to create this using more power applications

"It is used as a show case to demonstrate the potential of 3D maps as well as how 3D Spatial Data Infrastructures (3D-SDI) can be set up using standardized and open interfaces. The map display goes beyond simply rendering cached tiles that are somehow distorted in order to create a perspective effect. It is based on a scene graph model that incorporates an elevation model and as many OSM features that we could process. This scene graph can be explored using the online viewer XNavigator. Preparing OSM data to be viewed in OSM-3D requires a lot of preprocessing steps which are done on GIScience's servers."

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM-3D

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Please read the background to http://www.osm-3d.org/map.htm

You can download the source code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xnavigator/

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Thanks for the info, but I was trying to get to a vertical map position, not a 3D projection. – Peter Cornelissen Aug 1 '12 at 13:25

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