Zurich — Path-Traced 3D 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.

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