Put your project into the street photograph

The photograph first

PhotoMatch. Load the street photograph as it came out of the camera or phone. PhotoMatch reads its lens, the time it was taken and, when the photo carries it, its GPS position from the EXIF data. It builds a camera with the photograph's lens and horizon, and sets the render size to the photo's own.

Shot looking up? Straighten the verticals gives a second camera with upright walls and a straightened copy of the photograph. The matched camera is left as it was.

• Reads time, lens and GPS from the EXIF data
• Works with eye-level street photographs

The site, from the survey

WorldBuilder. The map opens on where the photo was taken, with a pin where you stood and the direction you looked. Without GPS, you click the spot yourself. One press confirms the site. WorldBuilder fetches the official survey data around that point and builds the terrain and the building volumes at their measured heights.

Heights come from national LiDAR and cadastre where the country publishes them, not from a guess per storey. Where it does not, WorldBuilder falls back to OpenStreetMap, with fewer measured heights. Roads are not built from survey data: the street is your photograph.

• Coverage official survey buildings in 16 regions, official terrain in 28, measured October 2026; OpenStreetMap everywhere else
• Tested most in France, Belgium, the Netherlands

The camera, on the site

PhotoMatch. Click two vertical edges of a building in the photograph. PhotoMatch places the camera on the site model at real size, so the building you insert stands on the same ground as the street around it. The survey's blocks then sit on the buildings in the photograph. An edge can be clicked anywhere along it, so a foot hidden by cars or trees does not stop you.

With no surveyed buildings, mark the building on the photograph instead. A photo with no building in it, a park or a landscape, can be placed at the shooting point: at eye height, facing the way you looked, and labelled as approximate.

• Needs two vertical edges of a building visible in the photo

The sun and the render

SunSet. SunSet sets the sun from the time the photograph was taken and the site's place on the map. It does not read the shadows in the picture. The sun goes where it stood when the shutter opened, so the shadows of your building agree with the shadows already in the picture.

Joining the launch, not built yet: SunSet loads several HDRI skies and turns each one so its sun sits where the real sun stood, then mixes them in Corona's LightMix. You balance the skies after the render; their visibility, reflections and refractions are set together.

The photograph becomes the backplate in Corona. The site model becomes a shadow catcher: it catches your building's shadows on the real street, and a surveyed building that stands in front of yours in the photograph stays in front of it.

• Needs the photo's original EXIF time
• Renderer Corona