Awesome Way to Get GIS Map Data Imported Into Blender

Hey guys,

I just recently found something really cool for getting 3D models of real world locations. Here is a pic of a model of the Grand Canyon:


How You do it is you go to this site and make an account: Click ME

This is a GIS puller app that allows you to select a region and download a height-map. This could be used for areal flyovers to video game maps. The Data sets I use are ones under the “Digital Elevation” tab: ASTER GLOBAL DEM and a few others. It’s really easy and fun! The thing is you need a ridiculously high poly count to get all the detail needed for most places.

And for the newbies who don’t know how to import the height-map into blender, you make a new texture, load the tif image, make a plane and subdivide it a bunch, add a displace modifier to the plane, then add the texture to the displace modifier. You will probably have to bump up the strength a bit.

Thanks for listening I hope you found this interesting!

WOW! I bookmarked this post a while back to come and try it out when I had time and I just now remembered it and tried it out! This is some cool stuff! thanks for sharing! Do you know of any way to apply the image texture of the map to the plane?

It probably would also help decimating it by angle 1 or 2 degrees… this means that it will reduce the number of faces over all and help the rendering side of things. Also once this is done, i would apply the modifiers and version up… this way you dont have to recalculate the modifiers each time you open blender / render, and you can always go back if you have versioned up.

Hi!
Thanks for sharing this resource. Btw I have an issue when I download the heightmap from the site: always I obtain a black tiff heightmap image even if I open it with Blender or Photoshop. I’d appreciate any clue to workaround this issue.

Thanks in advance!

Hi!

Thanks for sharing this resource. Btw I have an issue when I download the heightmap from the site: always I obtain a black tiff heightmap image even if I open it with Blender or Photoshop. I’d appreciate any clue to workaround this issue.

Thanks in advance!

Hi!
Thanks for sharing this resource. Btw I have an issue when I download the heightmap from the site: always I obtain a black tiff heightmap image even if I open it with Blender or Photoshop. I’d appreciate any clue to workaround this issue.

Thanks in advance!