Adding 3d Building Footprints to Maps

It's turning into CartDB day here on Google Maps Mania. Today CartoDB has released a map of Berlin museums to demonstrate the use of OSM Buildings data within CartoDB.

The Long Night of the Museums uses OSM Buildings data to highlight all the Berlin museums opening late this Saturday night before International Museum Day. All the museums highlighted on the map will be opening until 2 am on Sunday morning.

The map uses OSM Buildings data to create 3d footprints of each of the museums. It is a powerful tool to highlight individual buildings on a map. The CartoDB Blog has a post explaining a little about how you can incorporate 3d buildings on your own CartoDB maps and they have also open-sourced the code for the above map on GitHub.


If you want to create 3d building footprints on Google Maps John Dyer has posted a tutorial explaining how you can use polygons to create the effect of 3d buildings. Using polygons is a bit more convoluted and not as elegant as CartoDB's solution but it can be used to create striking Google Maps, especially combined with Google Maps' oblique aerial view.

John's tutorial explains how he created the 3d buildings used on the awesome DTS Dallas Theological Seminary campus map. The use of polygons and the Google Maps 45° oblique aerial view on the campus map really does help to focus the map user's attention onto the highlighted buildings.