I just spent five hours in frustration trying to clean up a neighborhood enough to import it into Unreal and was just about to give up and use one of those very templately-looking building packs, so this will absolutely save me. Thank you!
It depends on what you want to do, if you want to develop a game with random environment, templately-looking building packs, or builidify blender works, but if you want to do kind more scientific work, then spending so much time is the only choice.
Thank for the tutorial, really easy to follow and straight foward, i found i few issues and want to share how i circunvented them for other users. Blender hangs/freezes during the UV Unwrap: this is normal and you should let it sit there not clicking the window for some time, consider the specs of your pc and the size of your mesh, i would say worse case, leave it for 2-3 hours if needed, if it doesn't finish just scrap the method and use the alternative one in the video, it took seconds to me that way (edit: i retried with a much smaller mesh and still took a long time but it worked this time, probably my pc not being able to compute such a large number of faces and vertices in a reasonable amount of time) blender crashing while trying to bake the texture: my blender was instantly crashing after i hit bake, i solved it by lowering the resolution from 8k to 4k, this solved it for me my pc is super old so maybe thats why i had issues
In one video, you’ve made at least a few other Blender tutorials I’ve watched obsolete. They’ve showed me the hard way to do things like retopoing and uv unwrapping... you come along and show me “Hey, there’s literally automatic solutions to these things.” Thank-you. Problem is, I no longer trust any other Blender tutorials but yours, and you don’t have enough! 😫
This indeed worked very well for me, thank you. I had to get the right software configuration, and some extra cleanup steps around decimation, but within an hour I had 3 different city areas converted out. Thank you.
Hi all, thanks for this tuto, Nicko16, nice ! so , i have just add two things at your process : first) , after the smart UV , remake another Merge by distance, and another smart UV . Second) in bake, selected to active: put extrusion à 0.0001 give a more beautyful texture .
If the bake results in a black image, this is because the google maps tile material dont have color, only emission. Just change the Bake Type to "Emit"
where so we change the bake type to emit/ is it before or after? ive tried it in the scriot and still a black map. thank you in advance for your response
@@badadvice4076 you can simply select the "emit" property, no need to do the steps indicated before. Just make sure you change the margin to 1px as in the video and thats it:)
If you don't want to use the script to clean the materials, you can just select your object, then select a default cube (or any other primitive) and use the "Copy Material to Selected" from the drop down menu in the Materials panel. That will take whatever material the active object has and make every other selected object have that same material. If the active object only has one material (or even no materials), all selected objects will get just that one material. The hundreds of others will be removed from the object.
I found out that after the "merge vertex by distance" but before the "duplicate mesh" you can apply a "limited disolve by UV at 20/25°" really helps to clean and simplify the mesh too.
With removing materials, I think it's easier and faster for those who don't like scripts to just select all the faces, apply the first material slot to everything, then use the remove unused materials option, and then remove the last remaining used material. Only a couple of steps and does not involve copying/pasting code or writing it yourself.
Really well explained, this is a great tutorial for all kind of reasons. I really like how Meshlab cleaned up the uvs, I feel like I'm going to need that program in my workflow to do for other models.
hey this video helped me out a lot for just baking textures onto a new uv in general. I am not sure how blender does this (magic?) but if you import an fbx, make a copy of it, then redo the uvs (for example if it uses only part of a texture atlas) - then do the same technique shown in the video to bake the texture from the old model to the new one, it gives you a new texture that goes with your new uvs. Brilliant! The tip about 'ray distance' and 'margin' fixed some glitching. Wonderful tutorial that has a ton of potential for enabling creativity - thank you!
Perfection! It works :) THX!!! Downloading from Google Maps with Blender 3.4 [Render doc 1.25, MapsModelsImporter-v0.6.2], newer ones don't work. Fast UV Mapping and texture baking with the newest (for now) Blender 4.0.2.
I have found a nice way to create a simple clean mesh but it only works on big cities or other simple non convoluted forms (no undersides) by shrinkwrapping a subdivided plane onto the buildings skyline.
This is a great video on how to process the mesh from the Google maps. I have a question... what about the night textures?. In your example, you have lots of buildings with windows...how do you handle the night textures? Thank you very much for your great help, I really appreciate it
The script you posted, if the scene is bigger takes a LOOOOOOT of time. Like hours. I found this one tha does the same in just two minutes: import bpy obj = bpy.context.active_object mesh = obj.data while len(mesh.materials)>1: mesh.materials.pop()
Hi Blender Community , much thanks to Nicko for sharing his techniques ! BUT I still have the same issue when i follow the steps : a lot of black faces after doing the bake. I have tested with meshlab and smart uv projetct, had a look on the normals directions, i still don't get what i missed !!! If someone has found the solution, it would be nice to share it ! At least I see that Nicko has just 92.000 vertices from his RDC capture and it seems to be a big view, the vertex count of my .rdc is around 200.000 (twice more) and in my view i just voluntary took one central building in a spaced area, not to overload and then to hope that my baking would be ok as in the video.
Thank you, this is a really great and tecnical tutorial, I probably watched it 5 times or more before doing it by myself. There is a good easier and quicker process alternative; you could simply shrinkwarp a subdivised plane on your mesh, and bake on it; cristal clear mesh, UV and texture.
Best tuturial in the internet. Just a question. I get tons of black small dots and triangles in the baked texture. How can I get rid of those? It seems that it has to do with the two meshes being so near each other? IDK.
Hey Nicko! I'm wondering if it's possible join smaller pieces of 3D areas into a larger area? Thank you for time and effort taken to create amazing tutorials btw! You've been great help.
This might be what you're looking for. Check out Elie Michel's new tools, for example: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BcGM76dwF_s.html
at 2.46 you say you will create a new UV unwrap and then there is a cut...what happens right there ? How do you 'create' a new one without going into meshlab ?
Hi Nicko, I have one question : what is your best merge vertice distance value (not visible on your video) ?, great job, wonderful technic, thanks a lot for sharing!
Thanks for this I want to 3D print my city! But is this the best method to print the detail of the buildings? Or should I use different settings in blender to texture the buildings before exporting a stl?
@@Notchur.Architect not the same person but I want to print a city neighbourhood by neighbourhood on an epoxy printer(anycubic photon mono x). It has a 4K resolution if that makes a difference.
I'm sorry but I have tried several times following step by step and I don't get a good result. I think my mistake is at 2:44 - 2:45. There is a small jump and I can't get the vertices of the model selected with the clean UV Editor. Can anyone help me?
Very useful tutorial. Strangely, the baking of the textures was not as simple as I thought and after a successful first attempt, the remaining tests resulted in a completely black texture.
@@RintarouOkabe9 I don't know if it was my fault or a Blender's limitation, or just the scene complexity. Anyway, I just gave up with Blender, even because I'm very limited with it, so I switched to 3ds Max, but wasn't able to find an automated procedure to put everything into a single and clean texture... there were artifacts all over the place... so, baking wasn't an option due to heavy face overlappings. Cleaning up the mesh was heavy time consuming, so I decided to keep everything into a single multi-texture material... it was a mess anyway, due to other problems and limitation I have found during the process. At the end I just developed my own workflow to cover 2,5 chilometer squared and to be honest, I'm really scared to repeat the whole process another time.
Thanks for the tutorial. Could you please do a tutorial on how to merge two sets of map data brought in from Blender GIS? I can't seem to figure out how to get them to merge the edges cohesively to make a decent game map.
If only I knew that earlier, thanks a lot!! I have one question: I noticed that when I zoom out and take a google maps capture, the resolution of the mesh gets smaller (there's less geometry). Is there any way I can get ALL the geometry? It would be really useful for a project I'm working on where I need to import a really big model, and I can't see how I could do this other than taking lots of close-up captures. Thanks!
Reduce your browser zoom to 25%, move around the area you want to capture to load ot up, then capture from aligned top biew by pressing the compass on google maps
Hey, thank you for your tutorials. its easy to understand for someone not used to blender like me. However, after I bake the final texture comes out as broken and not like the way it should. I have tried baking with all the settings advised by you couple of times, yet the output remains unchanged. I will be glad if you could help with it. Thanks!
@kashish sharma same here! Did you ever sort this out? @nicko any thoughts on this? The Margin and Selected to Active options have changed since you made this so not sure if tha'ts part of the problem - thanks for these tutorials!
Thanks for your tutorial! I followed the tutorial to import the mesh and tried to clean it up for 3d printing, but it seems that there were so many non-manifold that it is not usable for 3d printing. Do you have any idea on how the mesh imported from google map could be cleaned up for 3d printing?
@@MCxDRIFTY I read that is due the mesh having intersecting triangles so it doesn't seem something we can fix, I'm importing models now without doing the cleanup
@@kafkaphoenix Does not doing the cleanup improve baking results? Ill have to try that. I was able to get a lot better results from this method by increasing Ray Distance to 1 and increasing margin to 5. Still pixelated but you have to zoom in to notice.
@@MCxDRIFTY I mean cleanup reduce resolution because you delete vertices so it's up to you but I'm not doing the baking I just use the materials that come with the models, it's not FPS friendly tho but with small buildings is Okey I think. I will try your method
@@MCxDRIFTY I'm having the exact same issue. Tried a lot of things, also your adjusted settings. Also tried without reducing the vertices but it's still a complete mess. Any idea how to solve this?
Thank you, I learned a lot with your tutorials but once I bake, the texture resulting is 95% black... I just can see pieces of grass in the buildings, any idea about what could happend?
Hey brilliant tutorial, very accurate and precise and effective. I had 300.000 vertices to start (from google earth). Everything went like you described, but I ended up with a .obj file of 25 MB and a baked image of 125 MB, can that be right...?
Using the same bake settings, my resulting texture map is just completely black. I don't know what's going on. Tried going from CPU to GPU. OptiX to CUDA, and changed Ray distance. Nothing made a difference.
6:35 I know this was a problem with AMD GPUs back in ~2017, as they rely on OpenCL instead of Cuda. Not sure if that is still the case, but worth keeping in mind that AMD GPU support is generally worse in Blender.
Thank you for this tutorial!! Liked and subscribed! I was following it but for some reason when the textures are baked looks like they have a very pixelated shadows on them which makes the whole texture look pixelated. I tried 8129, 4096, 2048 resolutions. Everything else is set following the tutorial. Any ideas what can cause this?
I just ran into this problem as well today. I can't find a solution either. I've done this before on my laptop with no problems. This is my first time trying it on my new desktop rig, but I encountered this error.
thankyou for great tutorial, I tried using your script which is working well I think, i was wondering though which window do i need to open to see the script feedback?
Nicko I know this post is old but I followed the instructions but my bake is always black. I am using the Google 3D tiles, does that make a difference, not sure where i am going wrong. I didnt use your new script because the mesh is already a single mesh with google, but I did use he smaller original script you wrote. I have done this over and over and same black result. I am still new to Blender, I am a Maya guy.
Hello Nicko16! Many thanks for this tutorial series. It really helped me a lot. However i find an issue that maybe you can help me with. After the baking process the texture has some "holes" and looks like it lackes pixels in the baked texture. How can i solve this? Thanks in advanced!
Rodrigo Lima after doing it a few more times, I think the key is to make sure you select your original object first on the side menu, and control click the copy second
keep getting black bit when exactly following your tutorial.... cant for the life of me figure out why the bakes object always looks so inferior.... i am only doing one block of buildings.... belfast victoria hospital
Great Tutorial, really helped me out. One question. Sometimes when I join all the elements together I lose sections. Any thoughts on why this might be?
Hi, I can't be that helpful without seeing your project or getting more details into your workflow. But, I'll try my best. If you are following the tutorial exactly as he has laid it out, that part shouldn't be that error-prone so long as you are selecting all the objects in the collection. My only advice would be to make sure you are selecting all the objects before joining them by quickly scrolling through your scene collection before pressing ctrl+j. Alternatively, assuming this is being imported into a clean scene without a camera or lights, you can press "a" to just do a basic selection so that you aren't missing everything. Beyond that, if you are doing this in a scene that has other stuff already beside this google maps import, then just create this in a new file to avoid clutter so that it is easier to avoid other things causing confusion. You might also want to check that all objects in your scene are visible before trying to select them using "a", you can do this by pressing Alt + H. Hope this helps or that you have already figured it out, and if you have more precise questions then I can hopefully be more helpful :)
I don't fully understand the reason for this clean-up. Could you save the data from the rdj file directly to a obj and load it into Unity just like that?
