Been playing around with the Google Earth + Blender workflow. Street lights etc are mostly road+railway curves from Blender GIS, extruded and with emission materials and primary visibility turned off. Very hacky workflow, and trying to get consistent highest res data from Google Earth is a nightmare. Once stitched in Blender it's pretty quick, as long as you don't base the shot completely around a million emitters interacting with multiple fog passes, in which case GPU overload 24/7. Comped in Nuke.