// the find
joewdavies/geoblender
Tutorials for making 3D-looking maps with Blender and QGIS
A tutorial repo teaching you how to make photorealistic shaded-relief maps by piping DEM elevation data from QGIS into Blender's Cycles renderer. It's for cartographers and GIS practitioners who want outputs that look like physical terrain models rather than flat 2D hillshades. The renders are genuinely impressive — the Greece example looks like a museum diorama.
The QGIS-to-Blender pipeline is well-explained with screenshots at every non-obvious step, which matters because the Blender shader graph is easy to get wrong. The mask technique for distinguishing land/sea using a rasterized polygon is a practical trick that saves hours of guesswork. The DEM-prep directory ships actual Python scripts and a pre-built .blend template, so you're not starting from zero. The tutorial covers the GPU configuration gotcha (OptiX for Nvidia) that would otherwise burn an hour of confused debugging.
The repo is essentially a single tutorial frozen in time — Blender's UI changes between major versions and the screenshots are already showing mixed versions (2.92 and 4.2 references), so some steps won't match what you see. There's no explanation of DEM scale/exaggeration tuning, which is the parameter you'll fiddle with most and where beginners get stuck with flat-looking or absurdly spiky terrain. The automated DEM-prep scripts in the DEM-prep directory have no documentation beyond the README stub — you're expected to figure out the Python dependencies and .gpkg data format yourself. It also never mentions coordinate reference system pitfalls: if your DEM and AOI polygon are in different CRS the clipping silently produces garbage.