Zurich — Path-Traced 3D Orthophoto City Map · Framed Matte Poster

Every building in this map is real. The roofs come from Stadt Zürich's official LoD2 building model, surveyed geometry, not guesswork, and the terrain from swisstopo's swissALTI3D. Then I lit the whole city with a physically based path tracer, the same technique film studios use. The shadows threading through the lanes of the Altstadt aren't drawn; they're computed, ray by ray, from a sun standing 60° above the horizon.

Here the same computed light falls on the real city swisstopo's SWISSIMAGE aerial survey draped over the 3D model, so the photographed lake, quays, and rooftops carry path-traced shadow.

This is Zurich the way the lake made it: the Zürichsee pushing its basin into the city's heart, the Limmat carrying it out through the old town, and the fine-grained fabric climbing the valley slopes on either side, nearly two hundred metres of relief inside a two-kilometre circle. From the rail fan spreading out of the Hauptbahnhof to the quays where the lake begins, every block casts the shadow its true height earns.

Printed on museum-quality matte paper in an Ayous wood frame, ready to hang.

Details

• 2 km radius around the centre · 47.3690° N, 8.5410° E
• Buildings: LoD2, Stadt Zürich (GeoZ) · Terrain: swissALTI3D, swisstopo · Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors
• Path-traced global illumination — real computed shadows, not hillshade
• Archival matte paper, water-based inks · wooden frame, three shades