If you have a powerful graphics card I reccommend chaning the 'device' to 'GPU compute' - that way renders will be much faster. This enables blender to do its shaded-relief magic. In the same tab, we must also set the render engine to 'cycles' and set 'feature set' to experimental.Just like this % value of the scene dimensions, we can increase and decrease the 'render' value in the 'render properties' tab to determine how many passes blender takes for each pixel (higher = more detailed, lower = less detailed).In this example my DEM is 2348 x 2604 so I will set the plane X scale to 2.348 and the Y scale to 2.604. To do this, we can just set the scale of our plane to match the dimensions of our DEM. We also need to make sure that the aspect ratio of our scene matches our DEM image. Once everything is ready we can crank it up to 100% (or for bigger DEMs whatever our computer is capable of!) and the render will take longer but will produce an image with a higher resolution. This just means that renders will be a lot quicker whilst we are tinkering with different settings until we are happy. Set the dimensions of the scene according to the dimensions of our DEM image (in this case, the rendered DEM is 2348 x 2604 so I will set the X in scene dimensions to 2348 and the Y to 2604).Īlso notice that I set the % of the scene dimensions to 20%.This is done by selecting add > mesh > plane. Scene settingsįirst delete the cube that is loaded by default (left click then delete key). Please bear in mind that this will take longer the first time you do it, but once it is set up you can just reuse the project as a template and adjust the dimensions to the different DEMs. This rendered image is what we will use in Blender. Once you have your reprojected DEM, right click it in the layers tab and select export > saveas then in the popup window select 'rendered image' as the output mode. In this example I am reprojecting to EPSG:27700 (British National Grid). Now reproject the DEM into your desired projection in QGIS using raster > projections > warp (reproject). In this example I used a polygon of Wales to clip the DEM, both of them being the same projection (EPSG:4326). If you wish to clip the DEM to a specific area then in QGIS use raster > extraction > clip raster by mask layer and use a polygon of your area of interest as 'mask layer'. If you need to merge multiple tiles together for your area of interest then use raster > miscellaneous > merge. In this example I am using a tile which covers Wales.
Table of Contentsįirst download the elevation tiles from your preferred source. I will be going through the whole process, using Wales as my area of interest.
Tweet me your finished maps, and feel free to ask any questions!įor this tutorial i used the following software: This guide will help you prepare DEM data using QGIS in order to render 3D looking shaded-relief maps in Blender.