Terrain Raster to 3D Model using QGIS and Blender in less than 10 Minutes

hey everybody so today i'm going to show you how to go from an elevation raster which could be dted or srtm terrain model or a surface model whatever to a 3d model that you could use for 3d printing or you could use it for editing and 3d software like maya or blender or or sketchup so what you could do with this is you could go and take a bit of real world terrain and you could put it in say a game or you could use it to visualize land for a house that you might want to build or really whatever once you get it into a common 3d file format you can do really whatever you like with it i'm going to do this all with 100 open source tools as you can see i'm on linux i'm on ubuntu 2104 and we're going to use qgis to process our elevation raster and then we'll use blender to validate and convert the results into some sort of broadly usable format so the first thing we do is well obviously you have to have qgis installed and there's there's about a billion videos showing how to get up and running with qgis so if you need help on that just search around and then you can come back all right so the next thing we're going to do is install a couple of plugins the first plugin we're going to install is called qgis23.js and then the second one is called hcm gis and so those two plugins we're going to install we're going to go to the plugins menu item here and then to manage and install plugins and when this comes up you just go to all and we're going to use a search bar to basically search for those two uh plugins so the first one again qgis to three i'll just go qgis2 and as you type it'll start showing up i've got both these plugins already installed so this is just kind of showing you where to find them so you go to qgis 3 and then down at the bottom there will be an install plug-in button if it if it's not installed on your machine and you just use that and then when you're done installing that you just go to hcm and hcm gis will come up qgis to 3 will basically put our our raster into a 3d format and hcm gis it's not really required but it's sort of a swiss army knife base map plug-in and it'll give us the ability to put some some imagery over top of our model so that it's it looks all textured and all nice so anyway when those are all done installing you can just click close okay now we're going to load up our terrain again this assumes that you've got access to some sort of terrain i've just got a chunk of terrain that falls over new england in the united states and i'm going to just drag it over here into the main viewer and there's my terrain and so now we're going to zoom in on an area that we might want to clip out as a model so i'm just going to kind of zoom into this feature right here and i'll just i'll just leave it about there that looks good and then now we're going to use the hcm gis plugin to load up some imagery over top of this dem and then that'll be clipped out and used as a texture for the model so we go to hcm base map and i'm just going to use esri imagery and as you can see it all aligns nicely there so this is going to be our 3d scene so when we're happy with this we just click the qgis to 3js button in the toolbar which will bring up the 3d window and that's found right here this little tent green tent looking thing so once we're in here we basically just go to our dem that's our surface model that's that's over here in the in the layers and we turn it on and there we go and we have a 3d view of our area and most of the zoom typical zoom and manipulation options from other programs apply here in terms of how you're going to use your mouse to orbit and kind of manipulate the model this looks pretty good but we're going to do a couple of things just to clean it up a little bit and make it look just a tiny bit better we're going to right click on the the dem in the layer here and we're going to select properties and we're going to turn the resampling level up and i'm just going to turn up all the way and then we're going to scroll down to where it says other options and we're going to turn off this part that says build sides this is all preference space you can leave the sides on if you want i generally don't like them so i'm going to turn them off and hit apply and now it's been now it's been resampled to a little bit higher quality and there's our model that we're going to export and we're going to export this as a gltf binary gltf is a newer standard introduced by the kronos group and they're the same group behind colada and it's meant to be just as compatible as colada but it fixes a lot of inherent problems really performance problems with collada being a plain text gltf is a binary format loads a little bit faster so we're going to save this out and what's as a gltf and what's great is that blender already supports gltf so we're just going to go up here to file and we're going to go to save scene as and we're going to select gltf now i don't know about windows but at least on linux we're going to have to add we're going to have to manually add the the file extension when we save it out so i'm going to save this in my qgis folder and i'm just going to call it actually first down here at the bottom right i'm going to select binary gltf file and then i'm just going to give it a name we'll call it test train and i'm going to give it an extension of glb gl b just like that hit save and as you can see it's it's really quick it just exported it that quickly so now i'm going to minimize this get out this and we'll minimize qgis and i'm going to bring up blender and have an empty scene so to bring in that file you just go to file import and i'm going to go down to gltf 2.0 and then i'm going to browse to my qgis folder there's my glb that i just exported and i'm going to hit import there very quick lickety-split and if you're wondering where the texture went the texture is still there it's just that by default blender doesn't actually show you the texture in the in the layout window if you want to show the texture you can just go up here to where it says viewport shading you can turn it on and bam there you go and you've got your texture and as you can see it paints both sides of the model so i don't know that could be important if you're actually going to export this and eventually use it in some tool that cares about that like like sketchup so to export this if you want to export this to a colada for use in another in another program you just go file export colada put it in here and we'll just call it uh i'll call it test terrain again dae export the colada file and exported four objects there all done and that's it all right well that's all i got

Channel: Eric Eagle

Views: 36,986

Keywords: qgis, blender, terrain, 3d, gis, ubuntu 21.04, linux

Id: eZZ2MVLZN4o

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021