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A comment on 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 gia_ferrari on Sunday December 17, 2023 @08:27PM (#38678275)
Super cool that it includes high(ish)-resolution buildings! Folks interested in using this data may also be interested in OpenTopography[0], which is a repository of topographical datasets (some very high resolution) with possibly more friendly licensing terms. I used some data from them to make a physical topographic map of a mountain peak. The tooling is a little opaque from a newcomer's standpoint, so I wrote up a quick howto[1]. In short you go from GeoTIFF to an STL surface with phstl, then extrude into a volume using Meshmixer (could use something else).

0: https://opentopography.org/start 1: https://giferrari.net/blog/2023/1/2023-1-13-printing-lidar-t...

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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by dr_kiszonka on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:14PM (#38679177)
Nice write-up! I wish there was a place where I could have a piece like printed _and_ painted.
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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by sorenjan on Monday December 18, 2023 @04:29AM (#38680652)
If you're willing to make the textured 3D model yourself there are services that can 3D print in color.

https://www.shapeways.com/materials

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Re:Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normal... by samstave on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @10:12PM (#38716593)
HA!

I have been following your tutorial for the past couple of days. I run into a major nightmare with GDAL not being seen in python. Its installed in pip list - I have OSgeoNW, GRASS GIS etc - and no matter what I do, I cant get GDAL to work, thus the phstl conveter for mesh cant be run and I get stuck.

I was inspired by that exact same user when that was posted to /r some time ago - and I went down this path then - and got just as frustrated.

This is a nice tool, along with its desktop friend:

https://github.com/potree/PotreeConverter

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