I played with a dataset like this from OpenStreetMap, and other Geographic Information Systems data (did you know the US government makes freely available 10 meter resolution heightmaps of the entire continental United States? And in some places better?). It was a lot of fun, and a mild bit unsettling, looking at this publicly available data, and tracking down childhood homes in backwoods communities and seeing very accurate footprints of houses.
The GIS community has built absolute metric craploads of tooling to work with all this data and play with it. Check out https://www.gdal.org/ if you are interesting, and QGIS [https://qgis.org/en/site/] for an open source data viewer.
I used all this support and data to build a silly script to take in that heightmap data and turn it into a 3D model that could be imported into Blender (or other software). I'm currently "stuck" at trying to overlay freely available road data over that terrain.
Some data-sets are available as "databases" that you can hook QGIS (or similar software) to directly. No need to download the whole thing, it'll stream only what's required in your viewport.
I played with a dataset like this from OpenStreetMap, and other Geographic Information Systems data (did you know the US government makes freely available 10 meter resolution heightmaps of the entire continental United States? And in some places better?). It was a lot of fun, and a mild bit unsettling, looking at this publicly available data, and tracking down childhood homes in backwoods communities and seeing very accurate footprints of houses.
The GIS community has built absolute metric craploads of tooling to work with all this data and play with it. Check out https://www.gdal.org/ if you are interesting, and QGIS [https://qgis.org/en/site/] for an open source data viewer.
I used all this support and data to build a silly script to take in that heightmap data and turn it into a 3D model that could be imported into Blender (or other software). I'm currently "stuck" at trying to overlay freely available road data over that terrain.