// the find
domlysz/BlenderGIS
Blender addons to make the bridge between Blender and geographic data
A Blender addon that lets you pull real-world geographic data — DEMs, shapefiles, OSM buildings, web basemaps — directly into a 3D scene. Aimed at architects, urban planners, cartographers, and 3D artists who need to work with actual terrain and geodata rather than synthetic geometry.
Ships its own vendored projection and shapefile libraries so you're not fighting Blender's Python environment for GIS dependencies. The Delaunay triangulation pipeline from contour lines to mesh is genuinely useful and not something Blender offers natively. OpenStreetMap import that produces actual Blender geometry (buildings as meshes, roads as curves) is well-executed. Wiki documentation is thorough with a flowchart showing the many entry points — rare for an addon at this scale.
Vendored libraries (imageio, Tyf, shapefile) are frozen in time with no clear upgrade path — imageio in particular has moved on significantly. The projection module rolls its own CRS handling instead of wrapping PROJ/pyproj, which means edge cases around unusual coordinate systems are your problem. No test suite visible anywhere in the tree. OpenTopography now requires an API key with no graceful fallback in the addon's UI, which breaks the 'grab elevation from web' workflow for new users who haven't read the README note.