qgis2blender If you’ve ever tried bringing terrain data into Blender, you’ve likely found yourself repeating the same geoprocessing steps to prepare the data. DEMs often need to be merged, reprojected, clipped to an area of interest, rescaled, and finally exported as a 16-bit TIFF before Blender can use them as heightmaps.

As an aside, if you’re wondering what Blender is, or why you might want to use it for geospatial data, I would highly recommend Daniel Huffman’s excellent series of tutorials. Shaded relief created in Blender has more realistic shadows, to my eye looks more beautiful, and just looks more 3D in general. It will make every hillshade you’ve created in QGIS feel like crumpled paper.

Alone, none of the steps required to prepare a DEM for use in Blender are particularly difficult but they quickly become tedious when repeated for every project. For Blender users who are new to GIS, the data preparation process can also be a barrier to entry.

QGIS2Blender is a plugin I made for QGIS, that brings this workflow together into a single tool, allowing you to quickly and easily create data that can be imported into Blender.

You can find more information, including details about how the plugin works, by checking out the documentation on the plugin’s GitHub repo. The plugin is available now from the official QGIS plugin repository and can be installed from within QGIS itself by going to the plugins menu and searching for QGIS2Blender.