A 3D model of any city block, from the map.

A building, a product or a character looks wrong in a void. Putting it on a real street — with the neighbours at the right heights, the road at the right width and the hill at the right slope — is what makes a render read as a place. Modelling that context by hand takes an afternoon of tracing aerial photos; getting it from the map takes about a minute.

Studio's Real place import queries OpenStreetMap for everything inside the box you draw: building outlines and their height or floor tags, roads by class, water areas and land use. It builds the terrain first from elevation data, then raises every building with a roof — the mapped shape, or an inferred gable or hip on small homes, or a parapet with rooftop plant on a flat roof — and a facade picked from about twenty styles by building type, era and region. Roads with sidewalks and markings, water, land cover and trees go on last. In the Netherlands, North Rhine-Westphalia and Japan, open 3D city data supplies real roof geometry and OpenStreetMap fills the gaps. A dense downtown block of a few hundred buildings typically arrives in seconds once the area's data is cached; a first fetch of a new area waits mostly on the map service.

OpenStreetMap is volunteer-mapped, so what you get is as good as your area's mappers. Central districts of large cities are usually complete, often with heights; suburbs may only have footprints, and the import estimates those heights and tells you how many it estimated. Treat the result as accurate massing and street layout, not as surveyed architecture.

Because it is a normal scene, you take it from there. Drop your own model into the plot, swap the default concrete for brick or glass, add trees and people, set the sun for the real coordinates and render. mixos AI can do the import from a sentence, too, if you would rather describe the shot than draw the box.