OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed has spent more time working on his Blender skills than an awardwinning chef.
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Our Blender doesn’t look quite the same as your Blender? We selected the light theme so that it looks better in the magazine.
D graphics editor Blender can adapt to many different tasks, so we’re going to use it to 3 render 3D maps sourced from real-world data. The process is fairly simple and doesn’t require much in the way of Blender experience. You can take the map and height data resources from a variety of sources. What you end up with is a 3D terrain you can zoom, rotate, fly through and render. With Blender’s facilities, you can even animate the resulting object.
We need a 2D map image of some kind, along with a heightmap. In this case, a heightmap is a bitmap image in which the brightness of each pixel represents the height of that part of the map. When we combine the two, we have a 3D model of a map, ready for rendering.
You can use a variety of free online data sources for the map image and the height data. You’re not even confined to using it for real-world map rendering because you can also use a variety of computergenerated, mathematical images as input sources.
Acquiring the data
The first thing we need to do is to acquire some map data. For the method that we’re going to use, we require two images: a heightmap and a second image to ‘drape’ over that heightmap. The great thing about working like this is that it gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of the images that we can use. See the box for tips on sourcing suitable heightmap and map image files. One thing
