Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
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Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
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Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#2These blender-based shaded relief images have been popping up a fair bit in the geomatics space recently. I really love them, but they are fairly complicated to make. I developed the open-source geospatial platform WhiteboxTools (developed in pure Rust) to help with tasks like this. You can create multi-scale hillshade images with it and the type of shadow model displayed above as well with one click:
https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...
Better yet, you can create a dynamic shadow model based on a DEM using the ShadowAnimation tool:
https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/Guelph_Shadow_Animation/shadow_a...
multidirection hillshade: https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...
TimeInDaylight tool: https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#3Easier geodata workflow is to use the addon BlenderGIS
https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS
Advantage of DEMs is you can make fictional stuff as well.
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#4These blender-based shaded relief images have been popping up a fair bit in the geomatics space recently. I really love them, but they are fairly complicated to make. I developed the open-source geospatial platform WhiteboxTools (developed in pure Rust) to help with tasks like this. You can create multi-scale hillshade images with it and the type of shadow model displayed above as well with one click: https://www.whi…
Here are some more examples of the dynamic shadow models, that you may enjoy:
https://whiteboxgeo.com/Shadow_Animation/small_farm_shadows_...
https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/Shadow_Animation/Kitchener_shado...
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#5I use https://terrain.party to source heightmaps as image files, and perform any manipulation of the heightmap in normal image-editing software. It's a lot less funky if you already have the image-editing skill.
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#6Now to just send it off to a high quality printshop for framing.
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#7Why would you want to do this rather than using the built-in hillshader and 3D map view?
https://opengislab.com/blog/2018/3/20/3d-dem-visualization-i...
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#8This is apropos. I am buying some land and wanted to model it to help visualize building site options. There are publicly available topomaps and some DEMs but there was also LIDAR data sets too.
I spent hours learning how to render lidar point clouds into maps using QGIS and some other tools. Very steep learning curve but it was fun to do. Now to apply what I learned with this to make some neat shaded maps too!
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#9These blender-based shaded relief images have been popping up a fair bit in the geomatics space recently. I really love them, but they are fairly complicated to make. I developed the open-source geospatial platform WhiteboxTools (developed in pure Rust) to help with tasks like this. You can create multi-scale hillshade images with it and the type of shadow model displayed above as well with one click: https://www.whi…
Thank you John for your work with WhiteBoxTools, I was introduced to it when a former student of yours entered our GIS program at Selkirk College a couple years back and have been keeping one eye on it since.
You've got some really excellent algorithms and tools in WBT, I've used them to shortcut some obnoxiously long lidar/pointcloud processing with other packages.
I'm not sure that this is "less complicated" than the linked tutorial though, but some great exploration for someone who knows a little more ;)
Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender
#10Why would you want to do this rather than using the built-in hillshader and 3D map view? https://opengislab.com/blog/2018/3/20/3d-dem-visualization-i...
My guess is that Blender's 3D rendering and lighting is far better than most GIS packages, including QGIS.