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Comment by durkie | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit off-topic here, but can anyone recommend some good programs / workflows for programmatic image generation / manipulation?

I have some geospatial boundary data that I'd like to extrude to a 3d object, apply textures to the faces, and save images of the object at different perspectives. I have several hundred to do, so it'd be ideal to automate this.

Something like Gimp PyDev or ImageMagick seem like they could sort of work, but the math around creating a 3D extrusion in either of those seems difficult. On the other hand something like Blender seems like kind of overkill maybe.

It might end up being one of those solutions, just curious if anyone has any other ideas.

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Are you converting topo maps to 3d printable objects?

There is software for this, if you can do a workflow with various pieces of desktop software, you could automate swaths of it and then do manual portions where you need to make specific decisions that can't be automated.

The geospatial boundary data, is it geojson or wkt? What does extrude mean specifically?

No 3D printing: just making stylized images of OSM administrative boundaries. "Extrude" being to give the 2D boundary a bit of height and make it look like more of an "object" than a line drawing.

I think one of the versions of processing would be ideal for this.

You might want to look into Processing[1]. Depending on your needs it might feel more intuitive/appropriate for graphics programming, and there seems to be an active community of people who use it.

[1] https://processing.org/

Interactively scripting Blender in python is a joy in comparison to a lot of other environments.

Qgis and Grass, and the whole suit of geospatial open source tools. https://qgis.org/en/site/ for more

Not sure why you would think blender overkill for this. It seems perfectly suited to that, and can be scripted in python, albeit with mostly the same caveats as GIMP.

If you have several hundred, just start and figure out what tooling you need for your specific needs.

Automation comes later. It comes with experience.

openSCAD perhaps?

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