Blender GIS

In this video I show you how to import a height map and buildings using the brilliant Blender GIS.

You can download Blender GIS here:

Thankyou to all the OpenStreetMap contributors!

In order to access the 30m SRTM data you need to register with Open Topography and get an API key:

Once you have your API key you can add it into the Blender GIS addon preferences and it will be used automatically when requesting SRTM data.

[BH-dsk]

Tip: If you want an area at the highest resolution possible (zoom level 20), but the area you want is to big to fit in the screen....zoom out until your area fits in the screen, then hit L. This will lock the viewport and now you can zoom into 20 (you wont see it zooming in, but just do it), and you will see it start downloading all the map tiles at Zoom level 20, for your entire area! Then when finished, hit E like in this video.

[MrNajeebnajjar]

I'm a C4D user and guess what, after this video i just convinced the whole team to convert to blender!

[thesteaksaignant]

That makes flight simulator 2020 even more impressive. Being able to automate this kind of process and produce decent results worldwide is almost unbelievable

[pirobotbeta]

I did something like this 20+ years ago: USGS data massaged into a file format that POV-Ray could digest.
Most of the time went into writing the macro to convert the files.
Now I'm running Blender 2.90 and life is getting better all the time!

[TheVeganMantisGuy]

Wow, I had no idea GIS and Blender were compatible. This is mind blowing! GIS is really unstable software, so being able to just import it into a free program like Blender is an absolute game changer!

[alphbth]

You made my job easier, I was modeling buildings manually and it took a long time, I loved this tutorial. I'm from Brazil and I haven't found a Brazilian tutorial as good as yours. Thank you so much.

[miragerd]

Wow. Forty years ago, all that was very sensitive military technology used for terrain-matching guidance. Aside of a relatively small number of people, nobody knew what DTED (digital terrain elevation data) and DFAD (digital features analysis data) was. And now, we (including me) can use it at home. Thanks for the tip

[RetroPlus]

Great, finally I can effortlessly make cities

[killspiritproject]

Why am i watching this? Im not even a 3D animator. But the video is good i think i learned something

[ArchitectEnterprises]

Just the perfect plugin for indie developers to have city maps in their games!

[BrianOlsonPhotogent]

The number of tutorials I have seen on how to use Blender GIS, and you are the first, literally, the first I have ever found, that mentions using the "G" key to search for a location. In other tutorials, the search box just pops up with no mention of how the got it. THANK YOU!

[pepperkake]

"SRTM unavailable above 60 degrees north"

*Sad Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Russian and Canadian noises*

[rathemoor]

The ingenuity and skill of some people is mind blowing. Referring to the people who made this addon.

[MrtnX]

I've been thinking about a project for a wile now and this video just pop up in my feed. What a marvelous coincidence. Or not?

[Pecomica]

very impressive. As a GM who run my own homebrew, this will allow me to make large cities and settlements easy. And to look like they make sense. Awesome find. Thank you.

[KilnFirelink]

This is great, thank you for making the video I never knew you could do something like this, I have been slowly building a map of my town in blender for like 3 months now

[thelemoneater]

I've been messing around with this for a bit, it doesn't really work for smaller towns, not being able to recognize quite a lot of houses, but thats to be expected with a satellite image of a middle of nowhere town. For big cities like new york or tokyo it works like magic, I could imagine 5 to 10 years from now running a single script, it scans and builds a map like this, but also compares the scale and silhouette of the buildings to a library of skyscrapers and streets and swaps out the blocks with high resolution buildings.

[Ponlets]

i did this for seattle and the space needle is just a cylinder lol

rest of the simple buildings look solid enough tho lol

[keithmanfredi]

Beautiful. Around 4:08 it is like a slice of something organic or an organic circuit board of sorts. The way the roads cut through volume of the buildings is great.

[RobColbert]

First video of yours I've seen. I instantly felt like you needed more subs. I subscribed.