Blender GIS Software Tutorial

Liza Kolev 2023

Overview

GIS is a geographic information system consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. GIS is especially helpful with showing Shapefile data.

Blender does not have a built-in plug-in for loading Shapefile data, but one user called domlysz on GitHub created their own GIS add-on that can be downloaded into Blender and used.

GitHub Repository of BlenderGIS Add-On

The BlenderGIS  package can be downloaded from the GitHub of domlysz. As stated on its wiki, the addon requires at least Blender v2.80 to work correctly (in 2023). It's important to download the latest release and double-check the wiki about what version of Blender is required.

In addition, the wiki has written instructions on the installation and usage of the GIS add-on, so that will not be repeated here.

File for Tutorial

In the video tutorial below, we'll be using this Shapefile representing data of the boundaries of all the countries in the world.

Video Tutorial