LIDAR This area is covered by an open lidar terrain model — it is already used here.
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, shift-drag to move
Scroll to zoom, drag to move, double-click to fit
urban:EXPORT turns any place on Earth into a ready-to-use 3D model and drawing in about a minute — in the browser, from open data. Pick an area up to 100 km², build it, check it in 3D and download it in the format your software opens.
Heights and floors from OpenStreetMap, roof shapes and building parts; gaps filled from Overture Maps, including China. Official LOD2 roofs in the Netherlands, Switzerland, North Rhine-Westphalia and Japan.
Lidar bare-earth models where available, Copernicus DEM elsewhere; contours with an automatic interval.
Centrelines or real road widths with kerb radii; bridges and flyovers at their own levels.
Sea from the coastline, rivers and lakes, parks, and trees detected on satellite imagery.
AutoCAD DXF, SketchUp DAE, Rhino 3DM, IFC for ArchiCAD and Revit, Illustrator SVG, FBX for 3ds Max and Unreal, STL for 3D printing — with layers.
Vector map with street labels, hillshade and shadows; axonometric illustration; terrain sections along any line.
Square, circle or a free rectangle with sides from 100 m to 20 km, up to 100 km².
3 areas a day up to 5 km² are free, no sign-up. Larger areas from 4 credits (about $2); credits never expire.
AutoCAD DXFSketchUpRhinoRevit and ArchiCADIllustrator mapContour lines3D printingFigure-groundCompare with CadMapper and TopoExport
Buildings, roads, water and green areas come from OpenStreetMap. Building heights are taken from the height and building:levels tags, otherwise a typical height for the building type is used. Terrain comes from Mapterhorn: in many countries (Germany, UK, France, Scandinavia, USA, Japan and others) it is a bare-earth lidar model at 0.25–10 m; elsewhere it is Copernicus GLO-30 (30 m), from which buildings and forest are removed using OpenStreetMap outlines. The source is shown under the model. Where OpenStreetMap has no buildings — much of China and East Asia, and many places mapped only by machine learning — outlines are added from Overture Maps (East Asian Buildings, Microsoft, Google). Their height comes from the data (height or floors) where available; otherwise a typical height by footprint size is used, so check tall districts.
AutoCAD — DXF R12, opens in any version: buildings and terrain as polyface meshes, roads and contours as 3D polylines, all on layers. SketchUp 8+ — COLLADA (.dae), every building is a separate group. Rhino 5+ — native .3dm version 5: buildings are real NURBS extrusions (solids with faces and edges), not meshes. Illustrator — a colour vector plan at 1:2000 with separate layers. Trees come as a TREE block in AutoCAD, a TREE component in SketchUp and a TREE instance definition in Rhino, so you can swap them all at once. FBX 7.4 opens in 3ds Max, Maya and Unreal, with layers as separate meshes and materials. ArchiCAD — IFC 2x3 (File → Open): buildings are solids on their class layers, terrain and roads are surfaces, trees are instances of one TREE object; the same file opens in Revit, BricsCAD and Solibri. There is also STL for 3D printing: the terrain becomes a closed slab with buildings and trees on it, scaled to about 200 mm. With Real road width on, roads and paths come as surfaces of their actual width, merged into one network with rounded kerbs at junctions (ROADS_AREA and PATHS_AREA layers), in addition to the centrelines.
Three areas per day per device are free, up to 5 km² each. One area can be downloaded in every format — that counts as one export. The counter resets at midnight Moscow time. Beyond that you can use credits: 1 credit for each extra area and 4 credits for each extra 5 km² (up to 20 km²; above that, 2 credits for each 10 km² up to 100 km²). Credits come in packs from $5, never expire and are tied to your email — see Pricing.
Meters. The origin is the center of the area, the Y axis points north, and elevation 0 is the lowest point of the terrain. The base can be a square or a circle. AutoCAD files are DXF — AutoCAD opens them directly and saves as DWG if you need that format.
The .skp format is closed. COLLADA imports into SketchUp 8 and later without plugins (File → Import) and keeps groups and units.
Trees mapped in OpenStreetMap are always included. With satellite detection on, the imagery is analysed in your browser: vegetation is found by its green index, trees are separated from lawns by the texture and shadow of their crowns, and buildings and water are masked out. Each crown becomes a tree whose size follows the crown width. The result is an estimate — dense forest is filled with evenly spaced trees.
A JPG cropped exactly to the area, north up. Where open national aerial imagery exists (most of the EU, Switzerland, the USA, New South Wales and Queensland, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong) it is 0.1–0.6 m per pixel; elsewhere it is Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 at 10 m per pixel. The source and licence are written into the file and shown under the model. The image is size × size meters: place its lower-left corner at (−size/2, −size/2) and it matches the model.
Draw a line on the map (up to 20 km, any number of points) and get a section: the terrain profile from the same elevation sources, buildings crossed by the line at their real heights, and water surfaces. Vertical exaggeration is ×1, ×2 or ×5. It downloads as DXF for AutoCAD with layers, SVG for Illustrator, or PNG.
It turns the model into a drawing: pick a standard axonometric view or orbit freely, switch perspective on, choose one of three graphic presets (no outline, thin outline, black and white), toggle layers and add text labels pinned to the model. The result downloads as SVG — real vector polygons you can edit in Illustrator — or as PNG.
OpenStreetMap has hundreds of building values, so they are folded into six calm classes: residential, public (schools, hospitals, civic, religious), commercial (shops, offices, hotels), industrial, utility (garages, sheds, roofs) and other. Every format keeps the classes as separate layers — BUILDINGS_RESIDENTIAL and so on — and the illustration editor can colour buildings by class.
Yes. Click Draw on map under Site boundary and click the corners. The outline is projected onto the terrain and appears in the plan, in the exports on the SITE layer, and as a dashed line on top of the illustration.
A building is extruded from its outline, but where OpenStreetMap has more detail it is used: building:part gives landmark buildings their real volumes (towers, wings, spires), and roof:shape builds pitched roofs — gabled, hipped, pyramidal, domed, skillion — with roof:height or roof:levels. Pitched roofs are built only for outlines that are close to rectangular; anything else stays flat rather than broken.