P-38 Lightning

Artwork Works in Progress
61

I’m using the GIS blender add-on to import my topography data. For those not familiar with the GIS add-on, here are 3 good videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj7Z1P2hUWk&t=259s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNtKnmRXVlo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6ypxnYtl0g

The original mesh created by the GIS software was pretty dense (3.1 million faces), but I was able to un-subdivide it and get it down to 12,000 faces. I plan on my camera being roughly 5,000 meters in the air, so I didn’t need 3.1 million faces of details. This reduced render times by about 80% and knocked my Blender file size down from 808,000 KB to 24,000 KB.

I used the color image generated by GIS to create a mask for my forest particle system. The mask looks like this (trees go in the white spots)

TREE MASK
TREE MASK1792×1280 251 KB

My “trees” are about as low poly as I could make them:

TEST2
TEST21402×897 188 KB

I also used the GIS image to create bump and roughness maps for the terrain.

TESTb
TESTb1792×1280 636 KB

TESTr
TESTr1792×1280 429 KB

It still has a long way to go, but this is what I have so far. It takes about 17 seconds to render and has 400,000 “trees”.

TEST
TEST1920×1080 517 KB

3 Likes
62

where did you get the data ?
Google map or other site ?

some site don’t offer the choice to select a smaller area
so end up with a full screen function of zoom and can get
very large data file

happy bl

63

If you watch the videos, they will show you how to get the data and build the terrain. You can select as much or as little area as you want. The software gives options for using Google, OSM, Bing, Esri, OSM WMS as your data source. I used Google.

Other than a my typically steep learning curve, everything worked right out of the box very quickly.

64

This is really coming along - the details are mind boggling! Great job!
I bet the next project is going to be a donut or something simple for a change! :smiley:

65

Are your P-38 dataset/models available to license?