Site Planning on Real Maps with Ploterr

Every building site has a real location. It has real neighbours, a real orientation, real shadows cast by the buildings around it, real pedestrian flows on the street outside. The design decisions made at the early stage — where the building mass sits, where the entries are, how high it can go, how it relates to the street — are almost entirely driven by that real context. And yet the tools most teams use for early design start with a blank plane, a white void, with no sense of where anything is.

Ploterr PlotSite starts differently. The site is real from the first session: real coordinates, real elevation, real satellite imagery on the ground plane, real 3D buildings from the surrounding urban fabric. You are not designing in the abstract and importing context later. You start with context and design into it.

Here is how the geographic foundation works.

Setting the site location

When you open a new site in Ploterr, the first step is locating it. The Mapbox place finder lets you search for any address, coordinates, or named location on Earth. Type an address or a postcode, and Ploterr drops a marker on the map.

From that marker, Ploterr reads:

• Latitude and longitude — precise coordinates, stored as first-class project data (not just a background image)
• Site elevation — metres above sea level, used to correctly position the ground plane relative to surrounding terrain
• True north rotation — the relationship between geographic north and your canvas orientation

These are not metadata bolted on at the end. They are the foundation of the project from the moment you set the location. When you draw a building on the canvas, it exists at a real location on Earth with a real cardinal orientation.

The ~330m zone boundary

Once you select a site location, Ploterr extracts a roughly 330-metre zone boundary around the chosen point. This zone defines the area from which geographic data is loaded:

• 3D buildings from OSM and Mapbox within the zone render as context massing
• The ground plane within the zone is textured with the appropriate map layer
• Street and terrain data loads within the zone boundary

330 metres is roughly two to three city blocks in most urban grids — enough to show the immediate neighbourhood context (adjacent properties, facing buildings, the street network) without loading so much data that the canvas becomes slow.

Map layers

The ground plane is not a blank surface. Ploterr supports several map layer types, each providing a different kind of geographic context.

Satellite imagery: the ground plane is textured with real satellite photography of the site. You see the actual colour, materiality, and pattern of the ground — existing hard landscaping, green space, car parks, adjacent rooftops. This is the most immediately readable layer for understanding what is actually on and around the site.

Street maps: a clean cartographic representation showing roads, footpaths, building footprints, and labels. Useful for reading the urban pattern — block sizes, street hierarchy, grain — without the visual noise of satellite photography.

Terrain: topographic data showing slope and elevation change across the zone. Useful for sites with significant ground level variation.

Each layer has independent visibility and opacity controls. You can overlay satellite imagery with partial transparency over a terrain layer to read both topography and ground surface at the same time.

3D context buildings

The most valuable feature of PlotSite for early massing work is the 3D context buildings. OSM and Mapbox vector tile data loads within the zone boundary as 3D massing volumes — each existing building represented by its real footprint and approximate height.

This transforms the site canvas from a plan view into a 3D urban model. You can switch to perspective view and see your proposed massing sitting among the existing buildings. You can check:

• Overshadowing: where does your building's shadow fall at winter solstice? Does it cover the adjacent public space or the neighbouring rooftop garden?
• Daylight: which facades of the proposed building are in shadow from the surrounding context?
• Scale relationship: how does the proposed height relate to the adjacent block? Does it step down toward a lower-scale residential street?
• Street edge: how does the proposed massing read from the main pedestrian route?

These are the questions that should drive early design decisions. Ploterr makes them answerable from the first session, using real building heights and footprints, not a generic urban model.

The most important early design decisions are not about the building. They are about the building's relationship to everything around it.

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The site canvas: designing in real context

Once the geographic foundation is set and the map layers are loaded, the site canvas is a real place. You draw building footprints, set storey heights, and immediately see how the proposed massing relates to the existing urban fabric in 3D.

The feasibility workflow in PlotSite — setbacks, envelope limits, yield scenarios — runs on top of this real geographic context. A setback line is not a distance from an abstract edge; it is a distance from the real site boundary at real coordinates. A height limit is not a number in a text field; it is a plane at a real elevation above the real site datum.

Decision trace captures why each option was accepted or rejected — which setback constraint drove the footprint reduction, which height limit ruled out the third storey, which neighbouring building created the daylight problem that sent you back to the massing. That reasoning stays attached to the project and follows it forward into the floor plan phase.

	Ploterr PlotSite	SketchUp / AutoCAD
Real coordinates from project start	Yes	Optional — manual setup
Satellite imagery ground plane	Yes	Manual import
3D context buildings from real data	Yes	Hand-modelled or imported
Street and terrain map layers	Yes	Manual import
Setbacks and envelope limits on map	Yes	Manual drawing over imported image
Yield scenario comparison	Yes	Manual — separate files
Decision trace	Yes	No
Available on free tier	Yes	yes (SketchUp web)

How PlotSite connects to the rest of the workflow

PlotSite is the first phase of the Ploterr workflow, not a standalone tool. Once the site analysis is done, the same canvas moves into PlotBoard — the full BIM editing environment.

Buildings that started as massing volumes on the site canvas become Building entities with levels and elements. The geographic foundation stays: the floor plans you draw in PlotBoard are at real coordinates, with real north, at real elevation. When you add a Mapbox satellite layer to a sheet viewport, the site plan shows the real map beneath the proposed building footprint.

The workflow is a straight line from site selection to quantity takeoff and drawing sheets — no switching tools, no re-importing geometry, no losing the geographic context along the way.

Site planning has always required understanding context. Ploterr makes that context the starting point, not the last thing you check.

Early access · 25% off

Plan faster. Decide sooner.

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