Using Openstreetmap maps with Blender

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hi,

I’ve been trying to import from Openstreetmap into Blender - they provide SVG, PDF, and many other output formats (see here http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Export ), but so far I can import some SVG paths, whereas I’d really like to be able to import something that already looks like a map, then zoom around it, without having to recreate each road and text label…

There’s an interesting project herehttp://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper which animates changes that have been added to to openstreetmap, but I’m looking for something to make smooth zoom ins & outs of the maps themselves, not the changes recently added to the maps.

This looks cool but prohibitively costly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su0kdgOgd8E

I’ve also seen the various city generation projects going on on the blender forums, but I want to fly over a map of a real city, not generate a new city.

Thanks in advance,

Tom

#2

This is absolutely a project worth continuing. The openstreetmap wiki-pages includes the API to access the map data, and I guess this should be the road to read the information to a Python script. It has been a bit hard to find an functional program example to find out the way how to do it, but today I found pyroute, which seems to include about the routines needed to transfer the map data to own disk for further manipulation.

If anyone is interested of this, please inform of yourself. Maybe this could later be integrated in the other city generating projects, providing real data instead of random streetmaps.

First step could be to construct a simple python programm with input of [scale, longitude, latitude] and output of some kind of representation of recieved XML-data.