Hey all. noobie here. Wanting to create heighmaps from OSM data...

General talk
1

Hi all,

Title says most of it. I’m new to OSM as I didn’t even know it existed until I needed heightmap data for a Unity project I’m working on. But so far loving the reference material, even if I can’t get what I want from it…

TLDR;
I’m wanting to be able to create a grayscale heightmap of a certain area and then transform that data into a 3D terrain (Something like the first 2 images on this link to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heightmap).

I have looked into NOAA and SRTM (I think those are the correct acronyms), but the data I’m getting from there is of a far too low resolution. OSM, with it’s terrain topography contour lines is perfect.

So I’m left with either PAINTING, by hand, the height map data I want and then smoothing it within Unity (doing this atmo… it’s a long process), or extracting the info and creating a heightmap image file via scripting (which I would much prefer).

However, how can I get at the raw data in a manner that I can extract heights in an easily iterated format? Any ideas? Is this even possible?

P.S. If anyone knows of a project where people are already doing this, I’d love to see what they have and contribute to it if possible…

Many thanks. I look forward to hearing from you all.

Mike

2

I’m sorry, but OSM has no height data as you need. We have only a few nodes with an “ele”.
OSM offers only geographic data like streets, buildings, shops, …

Free available height data have mostly slow resolution.

But your aim is possible:

Good luck

3

As OSM itself does not contain any height data, the terrain contour lines you’re seeing on some OSM maps are generally produced from third-party datasets such as SRTM.

You could look at OpenDEM, which collects various elevation datasets.