phototiler (short for photorealistic tiler) is a lightweight native application that can render and export 3D maps. It accepts various mapping data sources such as vector tiles and GeoJSON. The data can be filtered and customized for your needs. The scope of phototiler is very focused: rendering highly accurate maps with advanced lighting conditions and exporting 3D models for ingestion in your own software or renderer.
phototiler isn't an advanced GIS software such as qgis due to its very focused scope. It is not a real-time and general-purpose map renderer such as mapbox-gl, Google Maps or Apple Maps. Also, it is not a typical 3D modeling tool, but facilitates interoperability with such software by exporting in a widely used format: GLTF, which allows you to import mapping data in well-known engines such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Cinema4D or Blender.
The default data is provided by nextzen. It contains some data from OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a collaboratively edited data source available under the share-alike Open Database License. You are free to use the data processed and rendered in phototiler for commercial and personal purposes, as long as you provide credit to the OpenStreetMap license. Here is a suggested attribution:
Processing by Phototiler, Tiles by Nextzen w/data from OpenStreetMap and Who's On First.
You will need a computer with an internet connection, a graphics card and sufficient memory to support the processing and rendering of 3D maps. A recommended configuration is the following:
Custom data sources is under development and will be available in future versions of phototiler.
Not yet, map labels could be added as a layer in other softwares such as Photoshop. They will be added in future versions of phototiler.