<story><title>Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normalized glTF 3D model</title><url>https://github.com/OmarShehata/google-earth-as-gltf</url><text>Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels&lt;p&gt;I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you&amp;#x27;re just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API &amp;amp; coordinate system.&lt;p&gt;(Note that the API prohibits offline use, as in you can&amp;#x27;t distribute a processed glTF file like this. But you can do this preprocessing in memory whenever you&amp;#x27;re fetching tiles).</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gia_ferrari</author><text>Super cool that it includes high(ish)-resolution buildings! Folks interested in using this data may also be interested in OpenTopography[0], which is a repository of topographical datasets (some very high resolution) with possibly more friendly licensing terms. I used some data from them to make a physical topographic map of a mountain peak. The tooling is a little opaque from a newcomer&amp;#x27;s standpoint, so I wrote up a quick howto[1]. In short you go from GeoTIFF to an STL surface with phstl, then extrude into a volume using Meshmixer (could use something else).&lt;p&gt;0: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opentopography.org&amp;#x2F;start&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;opentopography.org&amp;#x2F;start&lt;/a&gt;
1: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;giferrari.net&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2023&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;2023-1-13-printing-lidar-topography&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;giferrari.net&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2023&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;2023-1-13-printing-lidar-t...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Get any piece of Google Earth as a single normalized glTF 3D model</title><url>https://github.com/OmarShehata/google-earth-as-gltf</url><text>Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels&lt;p&gt;I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you&amp;#x27;re just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API &amp;amp; coordinate system.&lt;p&gt;(Note that the API prohibits offline use, as in you can&amp;#x27;t distribute a processed glTF file like this. But you can do this preprocessing in memory whenever you&amp;#x27;re fetching tiles).</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>savef</author><text>A couple of years ago Troy Hunt printed a map of where he lives in Gold Coast[0], using a separate piece of plastic underneath to show off the canal running by his house. I spent a while trying to replicate this and eventually gave up as I was missing way too many skills (as well as a printer). I might have another bash at it using this project - thanks!&lt;p&gt;As an aside, has anybody in the UK used a 3D printing service that they would recommend?&lt;p&gt;0: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;troyhunt&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1460146136514134021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;troyhunt&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1460146136514134021&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>