User:N0toose/osm-to-blender-guide

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Importing OpenStreetMap data into Blender using JOSM and OSM2World

This is a work-in-progress (unfinished!) effort.

It is not easy for me to finish "porting" this guide to the OpenStreetMap Wiki, as I lack the permissions to upload images.

Preamble

This guide was originally posted on my personal blog and adapted for the OpenStreetMap Wiki, so as to increase its usability and usefulness for the community.

The blog post, originally published under the terms of CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, can be found here: https://n0toose.net/posts/osm-to-blender/

Overview & Approach

  • There is a Blender add-on called Blosm which lets you import data from OpenStreetMap directly, but we will avoid it.
    • This add-on has a premium version.
    • This add-on is an abstraction layer that takes care of all the hard work for you. This was not desirable for me, as I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how things worked.
  • I stumbled upon the following resources:

As JOSM and OSM2World are both Java programs, you will need to install the Java Runtime Environment or OpenJDK (recommended) to run either of them.

Before I get into the steps that you need to follow, I'll briefly explain the software that we will use.

JOSM

As of the time of this writing, JOSM is the most popular tool used for editing OpenStreetMap.

It can also be used to download a portion of the map, which we will use for our renders later.

Download JOSM here: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Download

OSM2World

After fetching that portion, we can then import that portion into a program called OSM2World, which is maintained by Tobias Knerr.

Then, we can export that portion in one of OSM2World's supported export formats. One of them is the Wavefront OBJ Format (.obj), which we can import into Blender.

Download OSM2World here: https://osm2world.org/download/

Blender

Blender is a graphics software specialized for 3D use cases, such as animation and modelling. I will now assume that you kind of know what Blender is, but, in case you don't, here's the Wikipedia article.

Download Blender here: https://www.blender.org/download/

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