In-Depth Review: Cityweft
What It Is
A service that generates clean, editable, georeferenced 3D site context for any location: buildings with real roof shapes, terrain, individually placed trees with heights and canopy sizes, and separate meshes for paving, green space, water, and street furniture.
Who It's For
Anyone who needs site context in a modeling tool and is tired of extruding OpenStreetMap footprints or cleaning up a Cadmapper download.
Why It Matters
Most free context data gives you flat extrusions, which reads as a block model and is useless for shadow or visibility studies. Cityweft reconstructs around twenty roof types from national LiDAR and mapping datasets, so the massing around your site has the shape it actually has. It arrives georeferenced, in your format, ready to work with.
Problem Solved
Building site context by hand costs a day and looks wrong anyway. Cityweft lets you pick the area on a map, preview it, and export to thirteen formats including RVT, 3DM, SKP, IFC, DXF, and GLB, or pull it straight into Rhino, Grasshopper, or SketchUp through a plugin. A REST API covers programmatic use.
Audience Fit
Primary Users:
- Architect
- Urban Planner
- Visualization Artist
- Designer
Ideal Fit:
- Early massing, shadow, and visibility studies that need believable neighbors
- Rhino, Grasshopper, SketchUp, and Revit workflows
- Work in the fourteen countries with premium roof data
- Teams that would otherwise pay someone to build context by hand
Key Differentiator
Reconstructed roof geometry from national LiDAR, not flat extrusions
Workflow Fit
Project Phases Covered:
- Feasibility
- Concept
- Schematic
Where It Plugs In:
Pick an area on the web platform and export, or import directly through the Rhino, Grasshopper, or SketchUp plugins. Revit arrives as a native RVT from the cloud with no plugin needed, for Revit 2025 and later.
User Experience
Speed: Preview the model live on the map before exporting
Interface: Map-based area selection on the web platform, plus plugins and a documented REST API
Learning Curve: Gentle. Choose a location, choose an extent, export
Collaboration: Seat-based plans with shared projects from the Small Business tier and organization-wide API access
Integrations: Rhino 7 and 8 with Grasshopper, SketchUp Pro 2022 and later, Revit 2025 and later, Autodesk Forma through its data marketplace, and a REST API
Bonus Insight
The pricing has a second step that depends on your country and is easy to miss. Baseline coverage is worldwide, but the premium data that produces true roof geometry covers fourteen countries, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and each requires a country add-on of 29 to 199 euros per month on top of the subscription. Outside those, you get less precise geometry. There is no free tier, and the company's own pages disagree slightly on terrain accuracy, claiming under one meter in one place and under two meters in another, so plan on the more conservative figure. The company is the risk worth naming: Cityweft was founded in 2024 in Tallinn, has six people and about $484,000 raised, so anything you build on the API rests on a very small vendor. Against that, it has delivered what it announced, with Rhino, SketchUp, Revit, Forma, and the API all shipping within about eighteen months, and AEC Magazine has covered it twice. Customer names including Allies and Morrison, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Sweco, and Thornton Tomasetti are listed by the vendor and unconfirmed elsewhere. It supplies context geometry only, with no zoning, planning constraint, or environmental simulation data, and it does not publish how often the underlying datasets refresh.
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