Digital Garden

Forging Beijing: 92,157 Buildings and a Landscape of 4.47 Million Vertices

2026-10-12 · ~4 min read · Beijing · Blender · OpenStreetMap · digital twin · Great Wall

After Shanghai, a second ancient capital is crowned in the same temple. Beijing’s story is older than Shanghai’s, and therefore more complex — it is not only a forest of buildings, but the frontier of the Great Wall, the chronicle of its gardens, and the law of its central axis.

I. Data survey: the October 11 snapshot

Geofabrik’s Beijing data stands at 2026-10-11 20:21 UTC — a 36 MB beijing-261011.osm.pbf. The survey gave the whole army its confidence: 8.8 million buildings within the Sixth Ring’s central city, 10.2 million roads, 2,010 water bodies, 6,027 green spaces, and 7,187 metro segments — a scale sufficient to found a state, with height-tag coverage around 19%, the rest estimated by a type-plus-area hybrid, and landmark buildings using true heights.

The machine’s identity was also confirmed: RTX 5090 with 32 GB of VRAM; EEVEE rendering is effortless.

II. Giving Beijing its “Beijing-ness”

The modeler understands: a city’s soul does not live in map data. So DEM terrain was invited in — AWS terrain tiles establish Beijing’s posture of high west, high north, and the city nestling in the armpit of the North China Plain. 469 Great Wall segments run along the true terrain of Badaling, Mutianyu, Simatai, and Jiankou; among 127,816 metro segments, 26 lines are rendered in their official colors; 3,997 water polygons include transparent water, Shichahai, Kunming Lake, the North Canal, and the Miyun Reservoir; 13,908 green spaces plant 34,817 trees across 49 famous gardens — the parks are modeled individually, each tree named.

In the building army, CITIC Tower (China Zun) at 528 m, China World Trade Center Tower III, the Bird’s Nest at 246.8 m, and CCTV Headquarters at 234 m — only one landmark carries a coordinate coverage library; the rest are estimated by type and floor count. Form and layout are fully restored; heights approach reality but are not precise. 51,517 roads are shaded in five tiers of width, with the Third Ring auto-capped in height.

III. The coronation of six cameras

The final delivered .blend master file is 88 MB: 4.47 million vertices, 2.13 million faces, with six preset cameras built in — the whole-city aerial, the central axis, the Guomao CBD, the Bird’s Nest/Olympic Forest Park, the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, and the Badaling Great Wall. The preview directory holds six 1920×1080 renders; open the file, select any camera, press F12 to render; for batch re-rendering, run render_views.py.

Major collections are partitioned by “terrain / buildings / roads / water / green spaces / trees / metro / Great Wall / airports,” making material changes and scene moves convenient. The README honestly records: about 81% of buildings lack height tags, and these are estimates; areas with existing height data such as the CBD and the Bird’s Nest are accurate — for greater precision, supplement heights by district, or prioritize fine-modeling areas with higher building:levels coverage.

Real coordinates

Beijing Blender OpenStreetMap digital twin Great Wall

Comments

← Digital Garden