mantle placeHow to build a site context model for design presentations
Give a design review real surroundings — terrain, imagery, and buildings around your project — fast.
A site context model is the real-world surroundings of a project — terrain, aerial imagery, and the buildings and streets around the site — that you place your design into for a review or board presentation. It answers "what is actually there?" and makes a proposal legible to clients and stakeholders. The slow way is to gather elevation, imagery, and footprints from separate sources and stitch them together for each project. The fast way is to draw the area on Mantle Place and buy a bundle that ships terrain, imagery, and basemap together, ready to drop into Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Blender, or Unreal Engine so your massing sits in true surroundings instead of a blank plane.
how to do it
Frame the context
Decide how much of the surroundings the presentation needs — the parcel, the block, or the wider neighborhood — and draw that area.
Get the bundle
Buy the bundle for that area. It ships terrain, aerial imagery, and a vector basemap together, clipped to your extent.
Drop it into your tool
Import the bundle into Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Blender, or Unreal Engine so the context arrives at the correct scale and position.
Place your design
Set your massing or model into the context, then light, frame, and render the views for the review.
frequently asked
What is a site context model?
It is the real-world surroundings of a project — terrain, aerial imagery, and nearby buildings and streets — that you place a design into so a review reads against true context.
Which tools can I use the context model in?
Mantle Place bundles ship in portable formats — DWG, OBJ, glTF, and GeoTIFF — that import into Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Blender, and Unreal Engine.
How fast can I get a context model for a site?
Draw the area, buy the bundle, and download it — minutes rather than the hours of sourcing and stitching that assembling context by hand takes.
Get the data for your site.
Draw your area, see the price, and download an owned bundle — terrain, imagery, and basemap ready for Unreal Engine, Blender, and your CAD tools.