Elevation data was pulled from OpenTopography, and map was visualized in Blender and QGIS

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I like this visualization. Do the colors represent different soils/geologies?

Yes, different colors are different rock types! Here is the legend for this map:

https://imgur.com/a/Hfpt6iq

Utah is handsdown one of, if not the most beautiful geological places on earth

Wow I want to horst and graben me one of these! That’s dope!

Where did you get the geologic dataset?

Is there an easy way to create a 3d mesh of a landscape? I use SketchUp and Lumion for various projects and would love to be able to quickly get accurate hills and elevation changes and all that but it's a huge pain in SketchUp and I'm not sure I do it anywhere near efficiently or elegantly. I've never used any other mapping services like you mentioned so not sure what kinda data I can pull there to make usable in modeling apps

Unsure of Sketchup and Lumion, but at least for blender, I got my start by using the tutorial linked:

https://wesleybarrgis.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/how-to-make-a-3d-map-in-blender/

If you want to create your own custom landscape WorldCreator is also amazing:

https://www.world-creator.com/

In blender, you can also create a pretty realistic landscape using noise textures or geometry nodes. There are plenty of good tutorials, or I just made a pretty complex one that I put on Blender Market that is fully procedural and customizable:

https://www.blendermarket.com/products/geometry-nodes-fully-procedural-landscape-

Great to finally see some tips on how to build something like this here (rather than just sell a print)! Any other tips?

Lots of stuff comes to mind :) One of the most useful to me was using the elevatr package (https://github.com/jhollist/elevatr) in R to get much more high-quality terrain data using the code below:

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library(elevatr)

memory.limit(size = 10e10)

topo_map <- raster::brick("name of georeferenced file.tif") topo_map <- raster::stack(topo_map)

elevation <- get_elev_raster(topo_map, z = 13, override_size_check = TRUE) elevation <- raster::crop(elevation, extent(topo_map))

writeRaster(elevation, "output name for file.tif")

Z will be the quality 1-15

Watch videos on QGIS on how to georeference (sometimes I will just do a rough outline to get the general area covered), and also how to import this file into QGIS and transform it to 8 or 16 bit so it is usable in blender

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You badly need a legend on that map. I’m really familiar with the geology of Utah and I can only guess at the color values.

Aww man, I live in the boring white part!

Blender’s a wonderful tool. I used to use it for vastly different things, but nonetheless it’s great.

It is brilliant. Fun to see, and I’m able to pick out my skiing places

Utah: Truly the state made to be a map. It even gives you somewhere to put a description.

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This is so gorgeous! And I really love that you've even included the tiny towns of Ephraim and Manti. I'm currently a student at Snow College (in Ephraim), and I'll have to show my geo professor this — she'd absolutely love it!

I cannot begin to describe how amazing it is to go out on field studies out in Juab. My favorites by far have been Topaz Mountain, the Tintic Mining District, and Mammoth (a very active (primarily) copper mine based in the tiny mountain-town of Eureka — which I am not surprised to see is missing from this map).

Thank you so much for putting the time in to make such a beautiful map of the state!

Beautiful!! Could you please explain your workflow in QGIS?

For QGIS Ido a few things:

1. georeference the original map 2 . Transform the DEM to 16 bit (raster — convert format — 16 bit) make sure in the command line arguments to type “-scale x y 0 65535) where x and y are the min and max of the raster that you can find by double clicking it in the side bar

Then set export to png