Google Maps 3D: Photogrammetry Mesh Clean-up

[@Nicko16]

This process can now be automated! Check it out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/l4LRnICLdrmXsKs

[@DodaGarcia]

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!

[@ahmadmohammadi2396]

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.

[@SkyfighterZX]

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

[@jonclement]

i've never used blender but I enjoy watching people create! Great tutorial, you'll save people a lot of headaches

[@groupb-live]

You will never know how much time of life you have just given me. 🙏

[@AWSVids]

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! 😫

[@alefedartagnan4256]

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"

[@badadvice4076]

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

[@Missi0n141]

Can't thank you enough for this tutorial. Brilliantly clear in the explanation even as a complete beginner with Blender!

[@k995100]

Tried the best way to get cleaner topology and found the blender remesh tool to be the best way. Gives you a very clean mesh with a decent topology.

[@aeonbreak4728]

do you have the exact settings to share?

[@k995100]

@@aeonbreak4728 Usualy (in 2.82) : mode sharp depth between 8-10 scale : 0.9-0.99 sharpness 1 dont remove disconnected pieces.

[@LloydSummers]

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.

[@rogermachin1046]

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 .

[@joshuasprinkling5450]

YES! That is the perfect fix!!! Thank you.

[@pastramichop]

This and the last video are INCREDIBLE. the efficiency in explanation is so good.

[@SteveWarner]

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.

[@masimons165]

Even easier: add cube, select object, shift select cube, CTRL + L, materials.

[@soma78]

@@masimons165 not working

[@PizzaTimeGamingChannel]

0:18 - Part 1 - Mesh 1:00 - Part 2 - Materials 2:04 - Part 3 - UV Map 3:21 - Part 3a - UV Map - Alternative Method 5:15 - Part 4 - Texture Baking

[@yash1152]

this shall be put in description with credits and thanks to the op....

[@user-jv9tv6cb8q]

Thx for it . So helpful 🤠

[@nathan1459]

Yes. Thankyou!

[@bim-age]

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.

[@ahmadmohammadi2396]

I did this, although we simplify mesh, but, textures will get messy as the original shape will a bit change

[@hanhu8510]

Thanks for this tutorial. This is exactly the same thing we are trying to do!

[@jojo-lp4rd]

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.

[@tobymdev]

Any idea on a simple way of cleaning the messy topology? Absolutely based tutorial, thank you.

[@tobymdev]

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.

[@k995100]

@@tobymdev Care to make a tutorial of that? Tried but cant really get decent results

[@Missi0n141]

@@tobymdev That sounds really interesting solution. Would also be interested in a short tutorial / write up on this

[@jojo-lp4rd]

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!

[@dreadmn]

mathemagics

[@MichaelFlynn0]

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 ?

[@91Soulja]

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.

[@MinhNguyen-vl7jj]

anyone found the solution yet?

[@Medienmechaniker]

3:14 so basically a day huh :D great tutorial

[@marcobelletz4734]

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()

[@holobolo1661]

How do you make a new UV map? video seems to skip at that point

[@alfredoconesa9737]

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?

[@B-water]

Another gift from Heaven...great job...thanks

[@elgalopinos]

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

[@wojciechzaczek4729]

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.

[@opm3d167]

Ufff. You came 24 hours late... Thank you so much. It´s cool.

[@LuisManuelLealDias]

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.

[@trepaning]

in Bake options for Selected to Active, try Extrusion at 1m and Max Ray Distance at 2m, worked for me.

[@LuisManuelLealDias]

@@trepaning will do, that actually makes sense. thanks!

[@josiahjack455]

These are really well done tutorials, excellent pacing, good notes and warnings.

[@bim-age]

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.

[@pianoscapes09]

bro teach me please

[@legrandcolin]

Meh, what about all cavities

[@i3d3]

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.

[@Yolwoocle]

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!

[@gravnine]

I have the same problem

[@joaotitodemorais8687]

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

[@Yolwoocle]

@@joaotitodemorais8687 Thanks!

[@ashdalat.]

no, you dont need to say "thank you", thank you for teaching me :>

[@sircher943]

I've been trying to do this yesterday and did all of this myself but had to research a lot, the raw data is a big mess.

[@kafkaphoenix]

I cant get the baking part right. Tons of black spots and glitches :( Would there be another way to unify the texture?

[@MCxDRIFTY]

same here. Tried rendering on gpu and cpu same thing

[@kafkaphoenix]

@@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

[@MCxDRIFTY]

@@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.

[@kafkaphoenix]

@@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

[@RagnarLothbrok1337]

@@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?

[@johanneszwilling]

Thank you so much! Last step would be the (free) Agisoft Delighter!? To get rid of the shadows so we can relight the model any way we want?

[@littlemountaintv]

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]

you're 3d printing the mesh OR the mesh with image data? what kind of 3d printer are you running?

[@mikedevyatov3213]

@@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.

[@tsunchoo]

Great tutorial - clear and concise and the chapters really help

[@timothykwok5070]

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.

[@Nicko16]

This might be what you're looking for. Check out Elie Michel's new tools, for example: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eJSqfmpsmdx5ldU

[@timothykwok5070]

@@Nicko16 perfect! Thank you

[@Angelo_Trifilio]

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]

How did you fix it? What mistake where you making? I get a black texture too.

[@Angelo_Trifilio]

@@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.

[@alefedartagnan4256]

the google maps tile material dont have color, only emission. Just change the Bake Type to "Emit"

[@jellykid]

How are your buildings so neat? Mine come in all blobby if scan from the previous tutorial works at all

[@IndigoKidda]

when you say make a new uv map before unwrapping it how do you do that, you dont show that bit so im stuck

[@MrTeeF]

Suddenly only getting blank Alpha images for the bake texture? What am i doing wrong?

[@jplsfx]

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!

[@lebenin3604]

Really appreciate your videos on #photogrammetry techniques. Thank you.

[@nikolaysalutski3270]

brilliant tutorial! well structured clear and informative - thank you!

[@edwardwilliams2564]

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.

[@tal0tal0]

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?

[@rogermachin1046]

roger Machin in bake, selected to active: put extrusion à 0.0001 give a more beautyful texture . :;-)

[@xaviermadden4076]

@@rogermachin1046 Life saver!! Legend

[@jinnavalon1704]

@@rogermachin1046 Life saver!!

[@notsure1969]

I can't wait to try this.

[@DropArum]

my baked mesh looks all messed up :(

[@lansraad6142]

Thank you so much! This has helped tremendously

[@KashishSharma93]

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!

[@RoryColeman]

@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!

[@KashishSharma93]

@@RoryColeman nope. i actually ended up using the model without any texture

[@andy135andy1]

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?

[@kcalb3180]

is there a way to remove trees? I have all these tress which is really annoying

[@dar780]

Great Tutorial! thanks for sharing.

[@rdrlima1]

I'm stuck at the Baking texture part of the mesh cleanup tutorial. The object just becmes gray, with no actual texture.

[@gerha1pp]

I had the same issue, try turning on the visibility of the first object before you press bake, I think that's what solved it for me.

[@rdrlima1]

@@gerha1pp Tried that. It didn't work

[@gerha1pp]

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

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!

[@trupale1]

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?

[@trupale1]

Basically buildings have black dots everywhere

[@BootyFebacca]

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.

[@jdathela]

I'm having this issue too. I tried GPU instead of CPU, which seemed to help but the problem still exists.

[@mtscott44]

Thanks man.

[@dreadmn]

all my extractions lose quality after smart uv, what can i do??!

[@DodaGarcia]

Are you sure the resolution you set for the UV isn't too low?

[@user-ki4kz7mm4w]

If i want to make a series open world 3A game ,shold i pick unreal or blender?

[@philhighfield4741]

nice tut, thanks a lot! Shame I am using c4d, wondering if there is a similar texture transfer option there!

[@MAIRENASEV]

Thank you very much,

[@tegmo]

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.

[@jso19801980]

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?

[@travh98_]

Thank you so much! I needed this!

[@ChristophLS]

Hi, thank you for the video. When I want to join the objects, the texture get's mixed up completly. any ideas?

[@odamariagunnarsdottersulhe5620]

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...?

[@jesuskraisnik]

Is there a way to improve a quality of imported mesh with some AI help for example?

[@maurice0822]

Great tutorial. Is this the same process to create 3D printed maps showing buildings, roads and water?

[@harveyjewett9768]

Great video. It would be really awesome if you could talk even faster and click through the menus at faster pace.

[@didierdel2319]

Bonjour, est-ce que cela veut dire qu'on peut faire du, photogrammétrie, avec Blender ?. Merci

[@SirLithen]

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.

[@murcsi9510]

Yes, that's still the case, only Nvidia has the license to use Cuda

[@SirLithen]

@jefha Performance wise, there is nothing wrong with AMD GPUs, it's the implementation and drivers. The hardware is fine.

[@JhonPitre]

I do merge vertice / distance but after that show me black lines hsadow on the map, how I can remove that lines please ?

[@pauperez5179]

once I bake it, some parts of the texture disappear, how can it be fixed?

[@AArmstrongC]

Thanks!

[@alhdlakhfdqw]

such a great informative vid thank you very much! :)

[@hamuArt]

Hello I missing something at the bake. When I select first mesh and than hold Ctrl and select the second I lost selection from the first one. :/

[@floppy12k]

Optional: save the texture and AI upscale it with Topaz Gigapixel for example, and reapply for enhanced texture

[@michaeltyers7336]

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.

[@owenvenes]

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?

[@I_Realism_]

Can I export road , water ways shape file which i have made in ArcGIS and merge within the blender

[@bendazzarius8359]

tank you so much very good tips

[@matejsvoboda9438]

How can i reduce the polygon count ? Maybe by some approximation of geometry or i dont know, but is there a quick way to do it, if it doesnt have to be precise ?

[@chrisgrieve5425]

Thanks for the video! Have you ever imported one of these into Revit? the mesh is fine, just struggling to map the texture/ material to it...

[@matthew_brown]

How does this look at street level?

[@Olivvierrr]

Is it possible to convert this part of city into a point cloud with "Point Cloud Visualizer" addon?

[@asibali5918]

অনেক সুন্দর i mean Very nice

[@user-os7kb4xs2w]

i had problem api show me not presentring how to solve this problem please

[@sebastienc8870]

amazing.Thank you!

[@rilosvideos877]

Great job and nicely explained! Do you know of something similar for cinema 4d?

[@johnvogt3888]

Thanks for the tutorial - really helpful. After the bake, I get lots of little holes in the texture - any thoughts on why or how to fix?

[@rogermachin1046]

in bake, selected to active: put extrusion à 0.0001 give a more beautyful texture .

[@johnvogt3888]

@@rogermachin1046 thank you !

[@paavo1294]

for me it leaves those transparent/black stripes when i bake the texture

[@bacolisdead]

ok ive done evrything i saw on your video , the last thing is .. im tryng to import this as FBX on KSEDITOR for assetto corsa and it got stuck on "not responding" , did i missed something or its just heavy to load and need time?

[@bacolisdead]

a message popped up sayng that BuildingMesh-XXX.XXX has too many vertices .. 65536 is the max and my file got 254571 .. any way to reduce them?

[@3bnui]

Hi Nick, I saw your outsourcing offshore video and i wanted to uv map a room picture onto a 3D model, but i'm really stuck and need help. Are you by any chance able to help me out?

[@GigaBizzy]

i tried gpu (cuda) and cpu baking but both were so glitchy.. any idea? also i want to make a fps in my city but it just looks too bad like the cars and shit sticking out looking like idk what its horrible thx

[@irl962]

for some reason my mesh doesn't have clean lines if you get my meaning ? if there a way to clean it up more ? like maybe smoothing which i forget how smh.. ?

[@meh.2689]

i get black textures on some parts any way to fix this