Creating world pieces in Blender
GeoJSON to 3D models with the Blender Python API
Our puzzle app needs some models to work with. Let’s create them using Python scripting in Blender!
This article is part of a series in which we build a mixed reality app from scratch. See the previous part here.
Before we get started, we need a good data source for our country outlines. I tried a few different options and liked the maps from Natural Earth best. They’re exceptionally clean and provide lots of layers to work with.
I’m going to use the medium-detail maps. Download the Admin 0 — Countries dataset. This data comes in the Shapefile format, a collection of files typically imported by GIS software. It’s a little hard to work with, so let’s transform it into a GeoJSON file using Mapshaper.
The GeoJSON format is pretty simple. Here’s a sample from our newly generated dataset:
{"type":"FeatureCollection", "features": […