Orbit the incident structure in 3D — photorealistic where Google has coverage, a footprint model everywhere else, and the view always says which one.
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What this does not do
photorealistic coverage is Google's and is **partial** — dense urban is full mesh, suburban degrades at close zoom, rural may be terrain only. Where coverage is missing the app falls back to a plain extruded model and says so on screen rather than pretending.
coverage is baked **one district at a time, not county-wide or statewide** — today that is the 25-footprint Stone Rd district in Rochester (24 modeled, 1 honest skip; see `CHANGELOG.md` v37.0). Outside a baked district the app falls back to the existing Overture-footprint extrusion and says so on screen rather than pretending. This is a reconstruction from real lidar data, never a survey, and never an automatic nationwide feature.
The view switcher above the map is one segmented control with four modes: 2D Map, 3D Scene, Street, and Aerial. Aerial is last, reserved for the photoreal fly-around. Switching modes never touches the incident record — only what you're looking at — so anything you've placed stays exactly where you put it.
3D Scene vs. Aerial
Both 3D Scene and Aerial are the same kind of view — an orbitable 3D model of the structure and its block, resolved by the same rule for which layer to show. 3D Scene is the always-available lane, the one that works everywhere. Aerial is the dedicated fly-around built for exploring Google's real photorealistic imagery when the address has it.
Click the View chip in the top-left of either 3D view to see which layer you're actually looking at. Its label carries a suffix — 3D imagery, Building model, or 3D imagery + model — that names the exact rendered layer, not a guess. Open the panel and the Building display group lets you choose between them directly: 3D imagery for the best available photoreal layer, Building model to force the footprint model, or Both to compose the model inside the photoreal scene.
Orbit, labels, and the pin
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, in either view. The incident's own address renders as a pin on the structure in both. In Aerial, street names also render as labels on the mesh — sourced from OpenStreetMap, credited with an "OpenStreetMap contributors" caption in the bottom-right corner — so you can tell which side of the building is which without hunting for a street sign. The Labels group's toggle switches between "Hide labels" and "Show labels" for the address pin and, in Aerial, the street names together.
Nearby structures
The Nearby structures group lists the buildings around the address so you can include the exposures that matter to a size-up and leave the rest out. What you include is what renders in the scene — nothing nearby is drawn by default.
Capture the view
In Aerial, the Snapshot button captures the 3D view itself — pin, hoselines, conditions, and all — as a photo you can annotate the same way you'd mark up a 2D map screenshot. See Photos and map snapshots for what happens to it after capture. The Capture group's toggle hides tactical overlays first if you want a clean shot of the building alone — but the imagery credits are never part of what it hides. They're baked into the saved image either way.
The building model itself
Everywhere the photoreal mesh doesn't cover, or where photorealistic imagery isn't switched on for your department, the 3D views fall back to a model extruded from the building's real footprint — not a guess at its shape, but not a survey either. In one baked district — the Stone Rd neighborhood in Rochester, 24 of 25 footprints modeled from real lidar data, one an honest skip — the fallback itself upgrades: instead of a flat extrusion, you get a genuine reconstructed building with real roof and wall sections, built from the same lidar the district was baked from.