By Coulter Heiberger · Updated
Bring a real location into Blender as terrain with imagery, without assembling the data by hand.
To get real-world terrain into Blender you need elevation for your area as a mesh or heightmap and aerial imagery to drape over it, both covering the same extent. The free, hands-on route is the BlenderGIS add-on, which imports elevation and basemap imagery if you are comfortable sourcing and aligning the data yourself. The faster route is Mantle Place: draw your area, order the bundle, and take its OBJ or glTF terrain, imagery draped and included at no extra cost, ready to import straight into Blender and refine. Either way the goal is the same: a correctly scaled, georeferenced patch of the real world you can model against. A finished bundle just skips the fetch, clip, reproject, and align steps.
Yes. The bundle is not locked to Blender: the same terrain and imagery open in Unreal, Unity, SketchUp, and more, so a scene you block out in Blender can move to a game engine or a CAD model without fetching the site again.
Choose the extent you want to model. Keep it focused on the site and the surrounding context you need to show.
Use BlenderGIS to assemble the data yourself, or order a Mantle Place bundle and, in your vault, download the Real-time set: OBJ and glTF terrain with the imagery draped, at no extra cost.
Bring the OBJ or glTF into Blender. A Mantle Place bundle imports at the correct scale with the imagery already aligned.
Adjust shading, add your geometry, and build your scene on top of the real-world terrain.
Yes. OBJ and glTF come with every order at no extra cost. They import directly into Blender, with the imagery draped and the terrain at the correct real-world scale.
BlenderGIS is free and hands-on if you have the GIS skills; Mantle Place delivers a finished, georeferenced bundle so you skip sourcing and aligning the data yourself.
Yes. A Mantle Place bundle is georeferenced, so it imports at the correct real-world scale with the imagery aligned to the elevation.
Draw your area, read its Site Brief, and download a bundle you keep: terrain, imagery, CAD drawings, and more, ready for Unreal, Revit, Rhino, and more. $5 plus $2 per square kilometer, and 2 km² and under is free.
Native plugins: Mantle Place for Unreal and Mantle Place for Revit.
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