Oh, I can do this with AI now…
September 2026
Can AI render a photo realistic scene now? Yes absolutely
Can AI do it technically accurately – absolutely not..well not with a basic AI like Google Gemini
I know this is a complex urban setting but nevertheless with Google Maps as its baseline Gemini should be able to get the various landmarks in the right place. Despite numerous attempts and comprehensive prompts it appears not.
The first two are my award winning heli shots of The Shard and the rest are Gemini’s best attempts to reproduce something similar
If you know London well feel free to laugh at the way HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge jump around the River Thames and on one the Shard suddenly appears on the north bank.
GPT-6 plus maybe a mapped environment created with Blender & OSM would work but would be very time intensive.
AI has its uses as a tool but without supporting it with other CG applications its still a long way off being professional standard for this kind of use.