tvnewsartist

It's becoming easier and easier to pull this stuff off. A lot of these maps can be found built and textured for the most part already. There's a lot of great Cinema 4D plugins for doing this. The render times... probably would take you a few days on your home computer but places like NBC have a render farm. I worked for a station in San Francisco that used to have a 3D skyline animation in their news opens for years and was working to rebuild it in HD in Cinema 4D before I left. It was amazing how easy it was and how good it looked.