Making elevation maps with blender
Geographical data is the kind of data capable to create interesting visualizations. Maps are the most common way to visualize it. Maps might contain country or state borders, climatic information, or elevation. Elevation maps show changes in the landscape and are useful for route planning and to have an understanding of the topographic characteristics of a location.
One form to encode elevation is by changing color or gray levels in an image. The elevation is encoded by the change in color or luminosity. This kind of encoding results in an image as the following.
This image can be loaded into blender to create a 3d elevation map. First, the image is loaded into a NumPy array and the mean value between the different channels is used as a proportional measure of elevation.
Then a plane is added with a number of faces equal to the number of pixels in the image. And each face is extruded towards its normal to create an elevation in the surface.
Then adding a simple color map to the geometry results in the following examples.
Now you have a simple example of how to use blender and python to process geographical data. This process can also be used to change a 2D mesh surface in many ways. As always the complete code for this post can be found on my GitHub by clicking here. See you in the next one.
