Unity3D with QGIS and GIMP

It has been a long time since I have posted anything on here. I now have my own commercial drone (and FAA license) with a nice camera, and I've integrated several open source projects so that I can create 3D models from imagery/video (photogrammetry).

So now I am looking to create a sort of unity experience so that I can showcase places I've visited in 3D, and embed them with the larger general area.  I think I will have a good amount of learning to do before I'm able to create transitions from 'high altitude' scenes to 'low altitude' scenes where vegetation might appear.  I don't think I want to try to "Place Mass Trees" with this large of an area.

I am calling the concept "ODT" or "Open Digital Twin" (Copyright OTT LLC 2019).

As you can see, the result is actually pretty nice.  You can obtain stereo DEMs (digital elevation models) from the USGS using WMS service calls.  I then created a Normal Map, and also used USGS WMS to fetch a high altitude imagery color map.

When creating the height map for unity, you'll need to ensure you are saving the map as "Raw Image File" with Planar mapping.

There is still plenty of work to be done, but I thought this might be a fun update to get me back in the blogging mode.  It's been too many years, and I've come a long way from the original work I did with Java & Hadoop.  Hopefully these GIS and 3D skills will couple nicely with my enterprise experience to bring 3D to the enterprise!