Blender – Topographical Sculpture
This started out as work towards CNC-ing this same sculpture out of a block of wood, but I ended up making a render along the way.
The topographical data is downloaded from the National Elevation Dataset (I used the 0.3 arc-second data), which is cropped & exported as an image in QGIS, then used as a displacement map in Blender.
The materials on the “sculpture” itself are fully procedural. The wood is based on Gabriel de Laubier’s excellent procedural wood shader, modified to turn it into a true 3D volumetric procedural material, so the map looks like it was carved out of a single wood block. The clouds are generated from the same displacement map used for the terrain; cloud density is a random musgrave texture, which can only appear at certain altitudes, and only above terrain in a certain range of altitudes.
