How to Create 3D Terrain with Google Maps and Blender!

so today we'll be generating 3d terrain from almost anywhere in the world and we're gonna be doing it completely free using Google Maps and an awesome new add-on developed for blender so what this actually allows you to do is select any portion of the map and generate a texture using Google's satellite imagery as well as a height map using NASA's elevation data provided online to create these 3d terrain message right inside of blender so you can do all kinds of cool things with these them like 3d print done or use them in the background of your scenes as mountains or something all kinds of cool possibilities it's a ton of fun to play around with so let's not waste any more time guys and let's see how you can use this add-on so before we can get started you need to download the add-on following the link in the description to go to the github page for the blender GIS add-on here you can see the awesome developer already has some documentation and a few examples of how to use the add-on and you can download the add-on from this location by choosing the clone or download option and then dropping it down and clicking download zip so while that's downloading then I'd like to quit give a big thanks to this video sponsor a skill share it's a brand new year guys with 20/20 and what better of a time to learn a new skill than right now because why not learning new skills is a ton of fun and with skills show you can learn basically anything you can think of by choosing from thousands of unique courses all taught by professionals I was just watching one of skill shares courses on how to create great-looking websites earlier today and learn some useful tips and tricks you can start using Skillshare free today by using my signup link in the description below and the first 500 viewers to use that link will get to three months of Skillshare premium after that it costs less than $10 a month so as you can tell there's never been a better time to start learning a new skill now that the add-on is downloaded we need to install it inside a blender so I'm just going to go edit preferences and over along the sidebar when to choose add-ons and then along the top right of the page you can click install and here you're just going to locate where you download it the blender GIS master add-on choose the zip file that you download it and click install add-on and here you can see is now installed we just need to check that check box to make sure it's enabled now and then in the drop-down you can see we have a few different settings here the only one we really need to worry about is the cash output folder here so for this I'm just going to make a new folder next to my blend file only it was something like cash and I'll choose that as the output folder then once you're still in the add-on preferences you might as well enable the node regular add-on because that's gonna help our workflow a little bit later on in the video so go ahead and check the node regular add-on and enable that as well so here you can see now along the top bar we have a GIS drop down and if we go to web geo data you can choose a base map from here we can choose a source either Google or Open Street Map or Bing I'm going to choose Google but Bing will also give you some interesting satellite data and then for the layer of course we are choosing satellite instead of map so make sure you have satellite selected then once you click OK you basically open up a Google Maps viewer straight inside of blender and this is really cool because you can basically explore the world here inside a blender and pick any location in the world that you want to use for your 3d terrain map and if you have a specific location in mind like I do you can search right inside a blender here too by hitting the G key and then typing out the location you want to search for in this case a half a mountain and then I want to use for my 3d terrain so I'm typing in Mount Wilder and then I can choose a zoom level for how close I want to be in on the map I'm going to choose 15 for this and then you can click OK and it will zoom it right into that location that you searched for here you can see we have some really cool terrain this is a location near Washington I believe where we just have some really cool kind of mountain peaks mountain ridges and some cruel rivers and creeks running around I'm going to pick a section down towards the bottom and to the left a little bit of this location where we have a river running across our scene with some mountains along the one side and hills along the other so you just gonna line up the exact location you want inside of blender using the middle mouse button and then hit E and this will create a 3d plane with that texture already mapped on top of it so that is really cool and a huge time-saver right there but the magic now happens in the next step here because now we can go GIS again web geo data and choose get SRTM to get the elevation data straight from NASA for this specific location so you click that you wait a few seconds as it loads in this data and as you can see here we now the 3d elevation from that location on our object you can see it's added as a displacement modifier here and you can tweak the strength if you want to exaggerate the height of the mountains even more but how cool is that you already have a 3d terrain with an actual location and the actual height data from that location straight inside a blender now we can increase the quality a little bit of like the shadows on this mash yes it's pretty low res but tapping into edit mode and subdividing it a few times you can see this does give us sort of a jagged effect though on our mesh and we can clean this up by clicking the little texture button there on the displacement modifier this will bring up the texture window and then you're just gonna scroll down under sampling you're gonna choose interpolation this will kind of just smooth out those ridges and give you the higher-quality shadows still with the cleaner mesh so now we can jump back to the modifiers tab and apply the subsurf modifier and then the displacement modifier ii and you can see we have our terrain here as a mesh ready to be modified I'm gonna give it a little bit of thickness so I'm gonna time it edit mode and extrude everything down along the z-axis here I'm just gonna scale it along these that access again to create a flat bottom you might want to bring up your search menu with f3 and search for recalculating normals at this point in case something got messed up there but there's our chunk of Earth and I'm just gonna open up an HDR environment texture here in the world settings to see what it looks like rendered now I'll link to some HDR is in the description below but you can see being rendered here in cycles we have our terrain and it already looks pretty fantastic in the render settings you can choose a higher contrast under colour management and then under film you can also choose transparent just to kind of get rid of the background image and only have the lighting data so here I'm going to split my window so we can bring up a shader editor and do a little bit of material tweaks on this mesh just to make it look a little bit cooler even yet so what I'm going to start off by doing is adding a little bit of bump mapping to our satellite image here by adding a vector bump node connecting the color output to the height data on this bump node and then I'm going to want to scale down our mesh because it's imported at a crazy high scale and so my settings just make a little bit more sense if I scale it down a little bit so I'm gonna scale it to about 0.25 to make it a bit more manageable to work with and then I'm going to connect the bump normal output to the normal output on our principal shader and as you can see the effect is very subtle so I'm going to tweak these strength distance perimeters on this bump no give me about three on both of them but you guys can play around with it I found this gave it just a bit more detail with some texture across those trees and stuff making it seem a little bit larger and scale and just adding a little bit to the effect now another method I used for adding a little bit of definition to these mountains is by adding an an ambient occlusion node here and cranking up the distance value to something much higher we're gonna go to about a 25 or even higher depending on your mesh and as you can see right now it just looks like white but we're gonna add in a converter math node change it to power and we can use this node now to kind of amplify the effect of the ambient occlusion node so cranking this up to 25 - you can start seeing we get some black in the crevasses of our mesh and you might want to play around with the distance to get more or less of this effect then you can go shift a and add in a color mix node drop it right into your color output there you were just gonna change it to multiply and then drop our power node into the bottom socket there and as you can see if I go to our shader here and if you were exaggerated the effect a bit just so you guys can see the effects that it's having but with and without it you can see that it just adds a little bit of definition to your terrain it kind of makes the mountains stand out a little bit better you also don't want to take these specularity way down on your principal shader node something like 8.1 because the mountains shouldn't be super shiny and then you're left with a nice-looking material on your 3d terrain now here's how you can quickly add a dirt material to the sides of your terrain by adding in a new material here selecting the principal shader and going control shift T this will allow you to import an entire PBR material using the node regular addon i'll link to the material used below but you're just gonna select all the textures and import them and you can see right off the bat we have all of the textures imported right into blender here then we'll just want to assign this material to the edges of the terrain here so I'm gonna choose face select mode while in edit mode by clicking the little option along the top bar there or hitting number pad 3 and a keyboard then alt right clicking to select that edge loop around the sides and click assign with that dirt material you want to go you smart UV project as well to kind of unwrap that real quick and easy this will allow you to project that dirt texture on the edges of our terrain here I can just increase the scale on the mapping node on all three perimeters to tile that eating more across our terrain and then I'm going to add in a color hue/saturation no real quick tweak the colors of this dirt material bring the value down to like eight point four and the saturation down like a point five then I have a quick tip for you guys here on how to add some different layers of dirt to that material and by doing this we're just gonna add in a texture gradient texture node and we're gonna connect it up with a color ramp so add in a converter color ramp node then you could just select a gradient texture and go ctrl T to add in a mapping node with that using the node regula add-on there and as you can see the color ramp now has that gradient texture but it's along the horizontal axis and we want to rotate that so on the mapping node under the wide rotation just type in 90 and that flips it to be vertical just like we want for this material and then in the color ramp node here we're just gonna create a few different layers of dirt throughout the color ramp so I'm just control clicking on our color ramp there picking a few different colors some kind of clay light colors maybe some sand light colors just kind of giving you different layers of dirt there across the terrain as you can see that looks kind of cool and now I could just add any color mix node drop it right into the color texture there we're gonna change the mix value over to overlay connecting our color to the bottom socket here and cranking it up to a factor of 1 you can see and that just kind of looks like different layers of Earth that made it look a little bit cooler for our renders but there you have it guys after not much work at all we have a 3d terrain from an actual location in the world right inside a blender and this can be used for all sorts of different things so huge kudos to the developer that made this add-on and then provided it for free for everyone it's a really cool add-on one of the coolest ones I've used in blender and as you can see you can create some really cool results using this add-on but that's not even all of it I have a bonus tip for you guys this add-on can do even more we can import the OpenStreetMap building data straight from google so do that I'm just importing a new map here I'm gonna search for a location where I know there's some building data like New York for example but a lot of the more populated cities will have this actual building data here I'm just picking a little corner of New York that has some buildings in the satellite image as you can see here I'm gonna hit eat to bring that right into blender I might as well go ahead and import the height map data for this as well because we can and it's super easy so why not here you can see there's not a whole lot of elevation to New York City it's relatively flat but we do have that extra data added and now what we can do is go to the GS add-on one more time the web geo data and this time choose get osm for Open Street Map data and here we have all kinds of different options for importing buildings highways railways all sorts of data and we can just select all of it by holding shift and then clicking through all of them also you want to choose elevation from object so it takes in mind that the elevation that the geometry has here then you just click OK you may have to wait a few minutes here as it fetches all of that OpenStreetMap data but there you can see we have it we just imported a whole bunch of city data straight from Google's Open Street Map data right inside of blender so we have all of these different buildings in the exact right locations so with this data you can obviously create all kinds of cool things like some City renders and whatnot and actually if you want a new video on using this add-on for creating some City renders inside a blender let me know what the like on the video and maybe I'll just make that happen if you guys do create something cool is using this add-on I'd love to see your finished results to go ahead and share them in the comment section below or send them to me on Instagram or Twitter my links are in the description and again I'd like to give a big thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video you guys can get two free months of skill show with that link in the description below and start learning a new skill now in 2020 but that's gonna do it for me guys thanks so much for watching I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you all in a future video Bob

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,055,207

Rating: 4.954649 out of 5

Keywords: Google Maps, Blender, 3D Terrain, Environment, Mountains, Easy, Free, Tutorial

Id: Mj7Z1P2hUWk

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/seesame]

Thank you for all your cool ideas and sharing them with us. You a wizard Setve!