Blender with Google Maps Experiment

Anything you can find in Google maps satellite mode, and that has 3 dimensional elements, can be captured, converted, and opened in Blender.

For this experiment, I chose Notre-Dame in Paris. There’s a wee bit of hacking, and you need an additional program plus an add-on, but then it all works alright to get it into Blender.

Above, I was able to grab a chunk of the city, with Notre-Dame in the middle. Here you’re seeing it in the standard layout.

But check this … it comes with colors and textures!

I chose a composition that filled the camera view.

And then a bit of a different angle, and I switched from Eevee to the Cycles rendering engine, which is more realistic. I also started to tweak out the angle of the sun, etc.

With a little more playing around, I got this result.

I liked a morning or dusk orange, low sun. I gave it some depth of field, as well. OK, the details are worthy of a video game from the 90s, and it looks like a miniature Paris for a train set, but I would mainly use it as a background, and there’s gotta’ be some tricks with focal length and other camera settings, as well as post production in Photoshop, to make it look more like full-sized buildings.

Now that I figured out how to use this technique, I’ll have to do a little project with it.

Stay tuned to see what I come up with.

~ Ends

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