By Coulter Heiberger · Updated
Where site-context aerial imagery comes from, what resolution to expect, and how to get it ready to use.
For site context you want orthorectified aerial or satellite imagery covering your area, at a resolution fine enough to read streets, buildings, and ground cover. In the US, NAIP aerial imagery at 1 m or finer is the workhorse; elsewhere, satellite imagery at around ten metres is the global baseline. The catch is getting it ready to use: raw tiles arrive in provider-specific formats and projections that still need clipping, stitching, and aligning to your other layers. Mantle Place packages imagery for the exact area you draw (NAIP where it is available, global imagery otherwise), clipped to your extent and delivered as files that drop into your design tools alongside matching terrain and basemap, so the ground texture lines up with everything else.
Yes. The imagery is not locked to any one tool. It ships as a georeferenced GeoTIFF and a draped texture, so the same photo underlays a Revit site plan, textures terrain in Blender, drapes a Landscape in Unreal, and more.
Decide the extent you need and how fine the imagery must read. Tighter areas keep file sizes manageable while preserving detail.
Use NAIP at 1 m or finer for US sites and global satellite imagery elsewhere. Mantle Place selects the best available source for your area automatically.
Crop the imagery to your area so it matches the terrain and basemap rather than shipping a whole oversized tile.
Drop the GeoTIFF into your design tool, or use the bundle’s imagery drape texture, so the ground texture aligns with your model.
In the US, NAIP provides aerial imagery at 1 m or finer; globally the baseline is ten-metre Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. Mantle Place uses the finest source available for your area, selected automatically.
Mantle Place clips the imagery to your area and delivers it ready to drop in, so you skip the stitching, reprojection, and alignment that raw provider tiles require.
Yes. NAIP is US public domain and Sentinel-2 is free and open Copernicus data, so commercial site-context use is allowed; keep the attribution your bundle names.
Draw your area, read its Site Brief, and download a bundle you keep: terrain, imagery, CAD drawings, and more, ready for Unreal, Revit, Rhino, and more. $5 plus $2 per square kilometer, and 2 km² and under is free.
Native plugins: Mantle Place for Unreal and Mantle Place for Revit.
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