3D city model for SketchUp

Build the urban context around your project in SketchUp in a minute: buildings at their real heights on real terrain, with roads, water, green areas and trees.

Open urban:EXPORT — free No sign-up · 3 areas a day up to 5 km² free · up to 100 km²

How to get it

Open urban:EXPORT and find the place: search by city, address or coordinates, or drag the map.
Choose the area shape — square, circle or a free rectangle — and its size (up to 100 km²).
Pick the layers: buildings, roads, bridges, terrain, contours, water and green areas, trees.
Press Create model. In about a minute you get a 3D preview, a drawing and the satellite image.
Click SketchUp (.dae) and in SketchUp use File → Import → COLLADA (*.dae). Units are metres.

What you get

Every building as a separate group, so you can delete or edit single buildings.
Terrain as one surface; roads, water and green areas draped on it.
Trees as instances of one TREE component — swap the component to restyle all trees.
Groups named by feature type: buildings by use, terrain, roads, bridges, water, green areas.

Tips

For shadow studies set the model’s geo-location to the latitude and longitude written in the file name.
Heavy model? Import a smaller area for detail and a larger one with buildings only for the background.
Need roads as faces? Turn on Real road width before building the model.

Questions

Which SketchUp versions are supported?

COLLADA import works in SketchUp 8 and newer, including SketchUp Pro and SketchUp for Web (via import).

Are the building heights accurate?

In the Netherlands, Switzerland, North Rhine-Westphalia and Japanese PLATEAU cities buildings come from official LOD2 models with real roofs. Elsewhere heights come from OpenStreetMap height and level tags; where they are missing, a typical height by footprint size is used.