Plan the project before you touch Blender

A city model is a data project before it is a modeling project. Two decisions up front save you hours:

1. Pick your extent. A few city blocks is a relaxing afternoon project. A whole metropolitan area is a data-management exercise — heavier DEM downloads, hundreds of thousands of buildings, and meshes your GPU will protest about. Start small, prove the workflow, then scale up.
2. Pick your purpose. A render backdrop only needs good-looking massing. A walkthrough needs clean geometry and sane polycounts. A 3D print needs watertight solids. The purpose decides how much cleanup each stage gets.

Install the stack first: Blender (2.83 or newer — BlenderGIS v2.2.15, the December 2025 release, supports the 4.x series and 5.x) and the BlenderGIS add-on from the domlysz/BlenderGIS repository. Set a cache folder in the add-on preferences; city-scale projects download a lot of tiles and you do not want them scattered on your system drive.

The full city workflow: basemap, terrain, buildings, roads

Step 1 — Frame the city on a basemap. GIS menu > Web geodata > Basemap, press G and search for your city. Zoom until the view holds your project extent, lock the extent if you want higher-zoom tiles for the same area (L key), and press E to export the view as a textured ground plane. Satellite imagery gives the best ground texture; switch to the map layer if you want streets drawn under your geometry instead.

Step 2 — Build the terrain. Real cities are not flat. Pull elevation for the same extent — SRTM through the add-on, or OpenTopography (free API key required since 2022), or import your own DEM — and let BlenderGIS triangulate the terrain mesh. On a city scale, the relief is subtle but it matters: rivers sit in valleys, hills push neighborhoods uphill. Keep the mesh resolution modest here; you can always subdivide. For the full elevation walkthrough see our guide to creating 3D terrain from DEM data.

Step 3 — Import the buildings. With the terrain in place, go to Web geodata > Get OSM, select buildings, enable extrusion, and let the add-on drape the footprints onto the terrain using mapped heights and floor counts. In well-mapped cities this produces a convincing massing model in minutes; in sparse areas expect flat boxes of default height, which you can still sell with good materials. The dedicated OSM buildings guide covers extrusion settings, attribute-based heights, and cleanup in detail.

Step 4 — Add the roads. A second OSM pass for highways and streets gives you the road network as curves or ribbons. Lay them slightly above the terrain surface to avoid z-fighting, and give them a dark asphalt material — roads are the single biggest visual cue that a city model is “real”, because they carry the street pattern the eye expects.

Step 5 — Polish. Merge duplicate vertices on the terrain, recalculate normals, and merge the hundreds of separate building meshes into a few objects by material (this is the difference between a viewport that crawls and one that flies). Add simple materials: muted gray-blue glass tones for buildings, green for parks from OSM landuse, blue for water. Keep the design proposal — if there is one — in full detail against muted context, the way the arch-viz guide recommends.

Render, animate, or export your city

Render it. The sun position add-on gives you accurate daylight from real coordinates; morning and golden-hour views of a real city sell themselves. Add fog or volumetrics sparingly for aerial shots — atmosphere is what separates a render from a screenshot.

Animate it. A slow drone-style flyover is the classic city-model deliverable. Parent the camera to a curve path, keep the speed slow (city scale punishes fast moves), and render at 24 fps; even a 30-second establishing shot makes a project feel finished.

Export it. If the city is heading to a game engine or a real-time viewer, see our export guide for Unity and Unreal — decimate, apply transforms, bake textures, and mind the centimeter-vs-meter scale difference before you cross the bridge.

One honest note: OpenStreetMap quality varies by city. Central districts of large cities are usually excellent; suburbs and small towns can be sparse. Check your area on openstreetmap.org before promising a client a full-detail model — the basemap view in Blender shows you exactly what is there.

How long does it take to model a city with BlenderGIS?

A few city blocks: an afternoon, including cleanup. A whole small city: a weekend, most of it spent on decimation, merging, and materials rather than data import — the import itself is the fast part.

Is it legal to use OpenStreetMap and satellite basemaps this way?

OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the ODbL, which allows use with attribution (credit “© OpenStreetMap contributors”). Basemap tiles come from their own providers (Google, MapTiler, etc.) with their own terms — fine for study and personal projects, but check the provider’s terms before commercial use.

Which cities work best with BlenderGIS?

Well-mapped cities with dense OpenStreetMap building data give the best results — check your area on openstreetmap.org first. Terrain quality matters too: flat cities need less DEM work, hilly ones need a good elevation source to look right.

My buildings all look like flat gray boxes. Can I improve them?

Partly. Where OSM has height, levels, or roof tags, enable the corresponding extrusion options. Where it does not, improve the look with materials (window-strip textures, varied tones by building), and keep the camera at a distance where massing reads well.

How do I keep a large city model from slowing Blender to a crawl?

Three levers: decimate the terrain, merge building meshes by material into a few objects, and work with the basemap texture at a resolution your GPU can handle. Viewport performance is about object count and texture memory more than raw triangle count.

Can I 3D print my city model?

Yes, with preparation. The meshes need to become watertight solids with a base — the same cleanup as any terrain print. See our guide to 3D printing terrain models for the mesh-repair workflow.