[Bf-committers] Geospatial Blender

[Sergey Kurdakov]

Hi Brylie,

Blender is not  intended to be analysis tool for all possible graphics
related tasks,
that said you should understand, that it is not Blender major point to move
in a direction
you describe.

While, on the other hand, you may  load geospatial data and edit it in
Blender,
and perform some simulations and it is very much welcome.

but overall, there are more appropriate ways to perform geospatial analysis
and visualisation, than to use Blender
( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS_Live_DVD OSGeo-Live DVD to get idea
of existing opensource geospatial visualisation software<http://osgearth.org/>
)

Regards
Sergey

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Brylie Oxley <brylie at gnumedia.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
> I am currently studying libre geospatial tools such as QGIS and GRASS,
> at community college in Nevada City, CA.
> http://qgis.org
> http://grass.fbk.eu/
>
> I would like to figure out how to use Blender3D for geospatial analysis
> and visualization. For instance, there is a nation wide survey of
> elevation data, in the United States, called the National Elevation
> Dataset (NED). I would like to take some known terrain data (from NED,
> LIDAR scans, etc.) and distort a Blender3D primitive (such as a grid) to
> simulate the terrain. This would open up many doors such as watershed
> simulation, fire simulation, city planning, game development, etc..
>
> There are several file formats involved in geospatial systems, most of
> which are already handled by Python GDAL/OGR. I think that my proposal
> is to integrate these tools into Blender3D via the compositor, game
> engine, or some other means. The compositor seems like a strong
> candidate for geospatial process modeling.
>
> http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.2/index.cfm?TopicName=An_overview_of_ModelBuilder
>
> I appreciate any feedback and/or mentorship that members of this
> community can provide. Would this be a worthwhile GSoC project? Thank
> you for your time and consideration.
> --Brylie Oxley
>