San Francisco 3D

• Full SF 3D model in Unreal Engine 5
• Skips weeks of manual city modeling
• Faster stakeholder review cycles

Geopogo Cities was selected because it eliminates the biggest bottleneck in presenting architecture in urban context: building or sourcing an accurate 3D model of the surrounding city. For San Francisco, that would normally mean weeks of manual 3D modeling, custom laser scanning, or drone photography just to recreate the streets, terrain, and skyline around a single site.

Instead, Geopogo Cities uses real-world map and GIS data to generate a full, photorealistic 3D model of San Francisco in Unreal Engine 5, complete with real-time ray tracing and Nanite geometry for handling a city-scale environment without sacrificing detail. Design teams can then import their own models directly from Revit, SketchUp, and other common formats and drop them straight into the real city.

That combination made it possible to evaluate and present a San Francisco project in its true context almost immediately, rather than waiting for a custom-built environment before any stakeholder review could begin.

Presenting a project convincingly in a real city like San Francisco is difficult without an accurate 3D environment to place it in. Building that environment from scratch is slow: teams either had to model the surrounding blocks manually, arrange drone flights or laser scans of the site, or fall back on flat Photoshop composites that could not be explored in real time.

That production burden made it hard to iterate quickly on a design's urban context, show multiple site options to stakeholders, or respond to feedback without starting the environment work over again, all of which added cost and delay before a single design decision could be reviewed.

Before a model like this existed, placing a building design into real San Francisco context meant weeks of manual work: modeling the surrounding streets and structures by hand, commissioning drone photography or laser scans of the site, or compositing renders into photographs in Photoshop.

Each approach required specialized skills and significant production time before a design team even had a base environment to present a project in, let alone the finished visualization itself.

With a ready-made, photorealistic 3D model of San Francisco available in Unreal Engine 5, design teams can skip the weeks of manual modeling, scanning, or compositing that used to come before any project could be shown in its real urban context.

Because the city model is built from real-world map and GIS data, imported building designs sit accurately against real streets, terrain, and skyline, and can be explored in real time rather than viewed as a single static render. That lets teams evaluate multiple site options, adjust lighting and environmental conditions, and produce new views on demand instead of commissioning a new shoot or render each time.

The result is faster stakeholder communication, quicker sign-off on design decisions, and fewer costly late-stage changes, since issues with a design's fit in its urban context can be caught and addressed early, while the project is still easy to change.

Geopogo Cities' 3D models are built from Google Maps and GIS data and rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and support model imports from Revit, SketchUp, Blender, Maya, and 3ds Max.