Spain LiDAR Building Heights (IGN) | 3D Building Data in Cityweft

Spain 3D building heights (LiDAR / IGN): Cityweft now provides nationwide LiDAR-derived building heights across Spain, producing accurate 3D building geometry for architecture, planning, and simulations—without OSM height gaps.

Export formats: SKP, OBJ, GLB, 3DM, DXF, GLTF, DAE, PLY, STL.

We’re excited to announce that Cityweft now supports a new nationwide dataset of high-precision building heights across Spain.

Using authoritative LiDAR data from the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN), we generate accurate and consistent 3D building geometry for cities, towns, and rural areas across the entire country — bringing a new level of realism and reliability to Spanish context models.

The updated dataset is live today across the Cityweft platform, plugins, and API, with no additional setup required.

What’s new

🇪🇸 Nationwide building height coverage

Cityweft now provides Spain-wide building height coverage, generated from high-resolution LiDAR surveys published by IGN and collected up to 2021.This ensures consistent and reliable building geometry across urban centres, coastal regions, and inland municipalities alike — from Madrid and Barcelona to smaller towns and rural areas.

📡 High-precision LiDAR-derived geometry

The LiDAR data delivers survey-grade elevation accuracy, capturing real building heights and roof forms rather than inferred or averaged values.This significantly improves urban massing, skyline accuracy, and terrain–building relationships.

🔌 Seamless integration across workflows

Whether you’re exporting via the Cityweft web platform, working in Rhino and other plugins, or accessing data through the Cityweft API, the new Spain building height layer is fully supported and ready to use.

Examples of improvement

With the new LiDAR-based dataset baked directly into Cityweft exports, you’ll notice:

• More faithful urban skylines

• Building heights that reflect real-world survey data

• Improved performance for site modelling, context studies, and simulations

• Cleaner, more consistent geometry compared to OSM-only height inference

Built for Spanish workflows

This update is especially valuable for projects working within Spanish planning, environmental, and regulatory contexts, where accuracy, consistency, and authoritative data sources are essential.

Whether you’re working on:

• early-stage architectural concepts

• urban development proposals

• environmental and solar impact studies

• large-scale masterplanning

Cityweft now provides a reliable nationwide baseline for Spain.

FAQ: Spain LiDAR Building Heights (IGN / PNOA)

• What is IGN / PNOA LiDAR building height data in Spain?

  • IGN (Instituto Geográfico Nacional) provides national LiDAR coverage through Spain’s PNOA program. This LiDAR data can be used to measure real-world building heights from elevation data instead of relying on estimated values.

• Does Cityweft cover all of Spain with LiDAR-derived building heights?

  • Yes — Cityweft provides nationwide LiDAR-derived building heights across Spain, covering both major cities and rural areas.

• Are the building heights measured or inferred?

  • Measured. Cityweft assigns building heights based on LiDAR elevation data, rather than statistical or template-based estimates.

• Why is this better than OSM-only 3D building heights in Spain?

  • OpenStreetMap is a strong baseline, but height coverage can be incomplete or inconsistent depending on region. LiDAR-derived heights provide more complete and reliable coverage across Spain.

• What can I use Spain 3D building heights for?

  • Common use cases include early-stage architectural context modelling, massing and feasibility studies, shadow and solar analysis, visibility studies, urban planning, and simulation workflows.

• How do I access the Spain dataset in Cityweft?

  • You can use it directly through the Cityweft web platform, plugins, or API — the dataset is already available without extra setup.

• What export formats does Cityweft support?

  • Cityweft supports export to SKP, OBJ, GLB, 3DM, DXF, GLTF, DAE, PLY, and STL.