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Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

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11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#11
For doing this type of work programmatically in R, check out the rayshader package:

https://www.rayshader.com

It has a high-quality pathtracing renderer built-in (https://www.rayrender.net) that only requires a single line of R code to produce results similar to what's offered here (without all the manual work).

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#13
post #9

These 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 t…

@xemoka Thanks for the kind words. I will respectfully disagree about the level of complication involved though. In this case, you simply open the ShadowImage tool, specify your input DEM, choose a palette, name the output and press run. I realize that there is a lot of GIS knowledge that is required in many cases, but this one is fairly straight forward to run.

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#14

Now to just send it off to a high quality printshop for framing.

looked into doing this last year for a bit - there are a few people selling these maps that are pretty cool:

https://scottreinhardmaps.com/ (from what I can tell he was the first one to do this?) https://twitter.com/geo_spatialist?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7C...

https://eastofnowhere.co/collections/best-sellers/products/t...

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#15
post #10

Why 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.

As well as higher-quality output with Blender, it's also possible to add atmospheric effects such as fog and reflection in water bodies.

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#16

These 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…

As a one-time guelphite, seeing the University of Guelph in that TimeInDaylight tool link caught me quite off guard!

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#18

Now to just send it off to a high quality printshop for framing.

looked into doing this last year for a bit - there are a few people selling these maps that are pretty cool: https://scottreinhardmaps.com/ (from what I can tell he was the first one to do this?) https://twitter.com/geo_spatialist?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7C... https://eastofnowhere.co/collections/best-sellers/products/t...

Ooh, interesting.

Now comes the difficult question, buy or make? The links you provided are certainly better than I can do, but making art is an enjoyable experience in its own right.

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#19

Easier geodata workflow is to use the addon BlenderGIS https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS Advantage of DEMs is you can make fictional stuff as well.

The other advantage is if you are working with other industrial design people (for stuff such as roads / bridges / buildings)... Having it all spatiall mapped correct to each other makes life SO much easier (and more realistic).

I feel like with Computer Graphics, the whole GIS understanding is very limited.

Re: Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

#20
post #12

This is really neat. I dabble in woodworking, and the workflow for making these maps is pretty similar to what I do to create the 3D models for CNC caved wooden relief maps: https://imgur.com/a/ZihtlwN

That's beautiful work. Do you have any resources you'd recommend to start learning how to make these?
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