Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normalized glTF 3D model

Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by knodi123 on Sunday December 17, 2023 @06:57PM (#38677683)

Looks like there's a blender plugin that lets you import glTF and output something a 3d printer would accept.

Would be cool to have a framed wall hanging of a bas relief portrait of your hometown. Maybe then print a satellite image onto a hydrographic film and apply it? (or just paint it to match?)

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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by dylan604 on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:49PM (#38679350)

my home town was just a bunch fields upon fields full of cows. i could probably just buy the toys from amazon and glue them to a piece of fake grass. would probably look 10x better than some 3D printer output.

not sure that's the image you had in mind.

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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by knodi123 on Monday December 18, 2023 @03:28PM (#38687737)

haha, mileage may vary based on which miles you're talking about! but my town's topography is distinctive enough that I'd recognize it. and if you paint satellite imagery onto it, even more so.

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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by MilStdJunkie on Monday December 18, 2023 @02:00AM (#38679924)

Yeah, BlenderGIS. It's the shiznit. I use that thing for basically all my terrain now; there's no tergen as good as ol' Planet Earth..

If you're doing visualizations or interactive stuff, it's also FAR better than just importing DEMs and displacing a subsurf plane, for the precisely same reason you can't have a perfectly accurate map on a 2d plane. The BlenderGIS stuff, meanwhile, will always be correcting for those sphere hijinks, so when fresh data comes in it isn't progressively more and more off. Which is precisely what happened to me when I tried to re-create FDR (flight data) on terrain generated from DEMs. The track kept deviating more . . and more . . and more . . even though the latlons were correct. BlenderGIS set me straight, and looked better.

Dang, I'd give my left nipple to do this stuff professionally full time, but whatcha gonna do.

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