FREE Add-On for Google Maps Cities in Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about the open street map add-on and how it's been updated to be able to bring in a lot of detailed City imagery using Google Maps information let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so you might have seen this announcement it's been a little while now um but this was an announcement from Google that they're making photo realistic 3D tiles or tiles of buildings available through their API so that you can actually download it through different plugins and extension you built this is good news because it allowed the creator of openstreetmap the ability to access this data directly inside of blender and so we've talked about the openstreetmap add-on for blender before but I wanted to kind of go through and do a Refresh on this and remember that the openstreetmap add-on gives you the ability to bring in map data and 3D cities and terrain and other things like that now note that there is a free version so if you just want to download the Google 3D cities and some of the openstreetmap data you can use this version in order to do that note that there's a premium version that also gives you access to textured buildings and forests and satellite imagery in here as well so I can link to both of those in the notes down below note that the Google version is going to bring in these tiles and these are just going to be kind of like a big chunk of building geometry while the open street map version is actually going to bring in buildings that are like UV mapped so that you can actually apply textures to them and other things like that so you can take a look at both of these I'll link to them in the notes down below but specifically I wanted to focus on how you can add Google 3D cities using this particular add-on and so there's a blog post which I will link to which really kind of walks you through everything that you're going to need to do now one thing you do need to be aware of is when you do this you are going to need a 3D tiles key through Google um when you do this you are going to have to enter a credit card now that being said even though you need to enter your credit card information with the Google page actually said to me is it said that your card will not be charged without you manually upgrading to a paid plan so even though you do have to put in your credit card number it says it's not going to bill you for any usage um it's just going to be there for when you upgrade if you go beyond the usage limits which honestly are pretty high um so 6 000 queries per day or 300 tile set queries per day I've not gotten anywhere close to this but I haven't used this Ultra heavily and so to enable this you're just going to want to follow the links inside of the post right here basically what you need to do is enable the maps API which again you can just kind of Follow The Links you can click on the button to enable and kind of follow the instructions in order to do that so if I click on enable it's already done for me but if you go into the manage button and click on the option for keys and credentials your Maps API key is going to show up in here and I can't remember I think you had to click like an add button or something like that but once you've added it your Maps API key I'll show up in here and you can click on the show button in order to bring that over into blender but let's jump over into blender and take a look at what this does okay so when you download this and install it you're going to want to install the add-on file that comes along with this in gumro to make sure that it's enabled you're also going to want to make sure that you set a directory to store your downloaded openstreetmap files so this is just a folder where it's going to save this stuff you're also if you got the premium version it's going to come with some assets that it's going to link to for some of the usage and you're just going to want to tell it where that's living right here down below this is where your different access tokens and API keys go right so like my Google 3D my Google 3D tiles key is going to go right here and then my map access token is going to go right here so that's where you're going to save those once you're done you're probably going to want to come in here and just do a save preferences so this all gets saved but now what we have is we have a tab over here on the right hand side of the page right if I tap the in letter key on my keyboard the N key that's going to pop up this little tab over here and I can click on the blender open street map tab to pop this up now notice how what this does is this is going to give us the ability to import different things in a location right and so it's using latitude longitude in order to do that um the best easiest way to set latitude longitude of a location is to click on the select button right here you know what that's going to do is that's going to pop up this page where you can zoom into a location right so for me I'm going to zoom into Denver right here and let's go ahead and pick something kind of downtown so we'll just go down here you can click on these show selection rectangle then you can resize that rectangle and it's going to set your latitude longitude which you can then copy into the add-on so we're going to pick this location right here if I click on the button to copy it's going to copy these different coordinates and then if I go back into blender I can click on the button to paste in order to paste those coordinates now if we look at this there's multiple different kinds of information you can bring in right there's the open street map data which is going to be the map data and the buildings through there you can bring in terrain you can bring in image overlay which is going to link back to one of those data sources in this case I might do the map box right here and there's the Google 3D tiles so let's say that I was to click on the image overlay and so if I click on the button for import notice what that's going to do is that's going to bring in tile images of the satellite imagery from mapbox and it's going to create an image inside a blender now I'm not a hundred percent sure but I think this image import is something that's actually one of the premium features I'm not 100 sure on that but I believe that it is but some of the open street map data that you can bring in right so if I do openstreetmap and I do a two-dimensional for example and I check these boxes notice how I'm going to be able to import those and I think you can do all of that with the free version so if I click on import right here it's going to bring in the openstreetmap information for this location like this right so you can use it in order to bring in um like roads and Footprints of buildings and other things like that now you could like tab in here right and extrude them all up in order to create buildings with them that kind of thing that's available in the free version okay so now let's take a look at the Google information that you can bring in right so what I'm going to do I'm going to paste this location information we're going to select the option for Google 3D tiles now notice that there are like massive differences in the level of detail that you can bring in so for example I'm going to bring in the whole city detail from that same location that we had before that's going to come in really fast because it's literally just going to come in with this mesh that's like super high level right you look at this there's not a lot of detail anything like that usually you're not going to use this by the way if this is all getting clipped out you just want to change your clipping length to something further right so I might change it to like 50 000 or something like that notice how that does bring in your city but it brings it in at a very low level but it did it very quickly now that being said let's say that we were to go back in here and do the same thing but bring our level of detail to maybe like groups of buildings and click on import now that is going to take a little while longer because it's going to bring in a lot more data but it's going to do it in a way that's much more detailed all right so if we take a look at what this creates notice how this is much more detailed right and this has given us a big chunk of downtown Denver right here like way more than we had selected now that is one thing that is really kind of annoying about the way the Google data is used um is that right now the Google Tiles for your city are significantly larger than the location that you select in here so um I did not select this entire area when I selected this with my map so if we take a look at this right I had like a very small area selected and if I was to bring in the open street map building data right so if I go to 3D realistic click on import bring this in and so then if I was to toggle the Google 3D tiles notice how this actually brings in the buildings in the area where I actually had selected them while the Google Tiles for whatever reason come in at a huge like much larger area now again I think this is a Google limitation rather than an open Street math limitation just be aware this is going to bring in a lot more data and so what that means is that means that if you do the Google 3D tiles and you do it on the buildings with more details which is the most detailed setting you could be sitting and waiting for a long time for it to bring in that data now that being said if we take a look at the data that's in here and this is just on kind of the medium setting but if we look at the data that's in here this gives us a really good indication of what the actual 3D City would look like and I'm going to go ahead and open one up that I used in order to bring in the Denver at a little bit higher level of detail so I think this one is the buildings with details sales Tab and so if you look at this these buildings actually look really good in the background so obviously they don't have like they don't have like reflection and roughness maps and everything like that but still from like building detail standpoint this actually does a really good job now one thing to be aware of when we do this is if we tab into this mesh notice what it's doing and what it's showing us is this is just a giant triangulated mesh right so what that means is that means you can't come in here and just edit out individual buildings make changes to them anything like that that's one of the reasons why the open street map data is valuable because those buildings come in as kind of like separate but definitely less detailed geometry but you can actually edit them you can't really edit anything in here I mean I guess you could kind of like play around with the mesh right so if we selected some vertices or something like that you could move them but that's not really going to help you a whole lot when it comes to um actually editing buildings themselves alright so overall I'm pretty happy with the rest results this creates I'd recommend at least downloading the free version and giving it a try and if you're looking for some things like that 2D satellite import as well as the openstreetmap data trees and forests things like that you can check out the premium version I'll link to both of those in the notes down below but leave a comment below let me know what you think as always thank you so much taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 124,941

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender google, blender google maps, blender google cities, blender OSM, blender open street map

Id: BE65zyZyZ9k

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023