Aerialod is a really easy software to do 3D stuff. I used it the first time to create a 3D population density map for Panama, and the procedure only took around 20 minutes! The only thing you need to create a map like this is some high-resolution Lidar data. The UK, as part of their National Lidar Programme, has good quality Lidar data that can be accessed through the environment.data portal. For this map, I used 50 cm resolution DSM (Digital Surface Model) tiles. The processing of the data was done using QGIS, in where I merged the tiles together and then clipped them to a circle extent covering Leeds city centre. After your image is processed to your desired output, you can simply just drag the file into Aerialod and twist the settings as you like (Aerialod only handles certain formats including png, tif and asc). I particularly used the tutorials from the Stats, Maps n Pix blog which guided me through the settings to achieve the resulting effects from the image above.