Acquiring Our Data
I have seen some really cool applications of DEM models in blender. I have done a bit of messing around in blender previously, however it’s been awhile and I never really got very good at it. So we shall see how this goes, but i’m taking a crack at importing the province of Alberta’s 25m DEM from Altalis. It is a public dataset so if you want to snag it head here Altalis.
What next?
Well given blender doesn’t natively support GIS data to make things easy, I am using the BlenderGIS addon. It works great though can take some effort to setup as you really need to install gdal and numpy in python as well. I won’t go into that as I really just followed the instructions on the BlenderGIS page.
As well to make my life easier, I warped all the data into the same projection (in this case UTM12N). This should make things easier in blender as they should at least all align properly.
I tried a few different methods for importing my DEM but it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped as blender didn’t like my .tif for some reason (After some research I now realize that its because I didn’t export it with a .tfw worldfile). Now that I have the worldfile I am good to go. I also used BlenderGIS to import google satellite imagery to overlay the mesh though I couldn’t find a great way to overlay that properly.
This is a work in progress for sure. Check back in the future to see how it goes.
Update
I haven’t made any progress in something that looks good; I think i need higher resolution data and a smaller area.