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This morning I was watching a "video editing" youtube video where he made a 3D terrain object to load into Davinci Resolve (commercial but free for personal use

This morning I was watching a "video editing" youtube video where he made a 3D terrain object to load into Davinci Resolve (commercial but free for personal use), and track to the palm of his hand so it looked like the terrain was floating above his palm. He used http://terrain.party/ http://terrain.party/ to get height information as an image (lighter colors are high, darker are low), then a script scrape together images from Google Maps, which he transformed using the height information. At that point he was using a GUI to view the resulting 3D object and manipulate the camera and lighting. Blew my mind. I followed it part of the way, but got stuck with getting the google images. He was doing a valley close to an object recognizable from space close to the coast, I was trying to find the cabin we stayed at last weekend in rural Colorado. Pretty mindblowing what you can do with free video editing software today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP6wVajeI_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP6wVajeI_M

mavhc 8y ago
Google Earth Pro is now free, and has an export high res image function
- andrey-g 8y ago
  Not that high -- 4800 x 2848 is the max resolution.
SahAssar 8y ago
That's a really roundabout way to do that though... He's basically taking free height data, converting it to a raster image, and then approximating it in the editor (which tries to convert the raster heightmap back to a proper map). The actual satellite imagery might be harder to (legally) get (and he basically suggests removing the copyright notices in the video). It's cool that it works, but it's also the "wrong" way to go about it considering all the tools around to work with open, free GIS data.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Indeed. I was stuck at getting the correct images for the area I had the height map for. My plan was to use the NAIP images, which I have sitting here on one of my computers, processed, and is free. But, I ran into some weirdness with Davinci Resolve where it was getting "Media Unavailable" for some frames of the video. Once I went down that rabbit hole, I was just tired of that video and wanted it done. So I didn't add a spinning 3D map of the area, just added some titles and music and called it a day. Agree that it's not cool to remove copyright.

mavhc 8y ago

Google Earth Pro is now free, and has an export high res image function

andrey-g 8y ago
Not that high -- 4800 x 2848 is the max resolution.

SahAssar 8y ago

That's a really roundabout way to do that though... He's basically taking free height data, converting it to a raster image, and then approximating it in the editor (which tries to convert the raster heightmap back to a proper map). The actual satellite imagery might be harder to (legally) get (and he basically suggests removing the copyright notices in the video). It's cool that it works, but it's also the "wrong" way to go about it considering all the tools around to work with open, free GIS data.

linsomniac 8y ago
Indeed. I was stuck at getting the correct images for the area I had the height map for. My plan was to use the NAIP images, which I have sitting here on one of my computers, processed, and is free. But, I ran into some weirdness with Davinci Resolve where it was getting "Media Unavailable" for some frames of the video. Once I went down that rabbit hole, I was just tired of that video and wanted it done. So I didn't add a spinning 3D map of the area, just added some titles and music and called it a day. Agree that it's not cool to remove copyright.