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3D Movies with GIS Data in Blender
  • 3D Movies with GIS Data in Blender
  • Data Sources
  • Importing
    • Importing Vector Data
    • Importing Raster Data
    • Importing and Aligning OSM Data
  • Materials
    • Setting Up OSM Materials and the Environment
    • Setting Up SHP and TIF Materials
  • Rendering
    • Keyframing for Animations
    • Creating an Optimized Render
    • Rendering on Adroit-Vis
  • Appendix
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3D Movies with GIS Data in Blender

NextData Sources

Last updated 4 months ago

Blender is a very powerful tool for making visualizations, especially those which can be elevated by a three dimensional presentation.

With a passionate community of users and developers behind the software, there are a number of add-ons and tools that we can reference to generate professional-grade movies. In this workbook, we'll be going over how to produce this visual:

As we generate this visual, I'll be introducing concepts that can be referenced to generate models of any geospatial data. This tutorial is meant for those who have at least a beginner background in Blender and a basic understanding of GIS data.

The following add-ons are required for this tutorial (and will probably be needed for any 3D geospatial project):

  • BlenderGIS

  • Blosm

  • Bpyproj

  • Material Utilities (no download required)

You can add these by downloading the ZIP (without unzipping) and going to Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install and selecting the files.

Within this menu, you can enable the Material Utilities add-on.

For this project and generally, it might be useful to have a third-party source to double check alignment and configure GIS data in ways that aren't possible in Blender. For this project, QGIS is recommended, but not necessary.

Finally, it's going to be required to access the System Console to see print statements from our add-ons. On Windows, this can be done by clicking Window, then "Toggle System Console". On Mac, we'll have to open Blender from the Terminal to gain access to the system console, which will then print on the Terminal itself. To do so, simply run the following commands in the Terminal:

cd /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS
./Blender

You can look into a tutorial on how to do make this call simpler (since you will probably need to open Blender this way more than once) on Blender's website.

Once the System Console is open (or you've launched from the Terminal), we're ready to go.

This tutorial uses Blender 4.1, but should be compatible with all Blender versions 2.8+.

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