Hi everyone! I have been using OSM for procedural road and city block generation. But recently I think something happend with either OSM maps or the mapbox labs tool in Houdini and while it downloads maps - its not processing any/breaks on import. I think there is potentially a problem with the Python script, but I am not proficient with scripting enough to fix that. Its usually giving out "file not found" with an occasional not breaking, but outputting 0 geo.

So I was wondering if anyone has fixes/alternatives for OSM? I am looking for something that hopefully can give out height maps for terraign, curves for roads and maybe some sort of guide geometry for building placement. I have conseidered Laserscans - but the free material is limited, and its mostly good for terrain only.

Thanks!

Hi GalinaB! While I don't have a full answer to your question, I just wanted to clarify that Labs no longer supports the Mapbox SOP plugin. However, Labs OSM Import SOP is working just fine on the few tests I've tried.

Thanks! That's good to know - though as far as I understand there is still no way to get heightfield information out of them. Is the only way to get both to match OSM Import files and Mapbox heightfields by hand?

Yes, that sounds like the right way to me. We don't currently have any other tools that can do that aligning automatically.

Hello,
I've been working on this topic as well. There is a video from Entegma called "Houdini Game Tools Assembling a 3D Scan Of The Earth", going through another method for aligning osm with height.

Their way of downloading heightmaps didn't work for me so I ended up getting height data from QGIS and the plugin OpenTopology and other sources. I then used osmosis to clip the osm in the same region and the Entegma method of aligning it in houdini. I thought about writing a blog post to go though the steps as it's a bit complicated

Otherwise you might want to look into the "Mapbox on steroids" node that someone made, haven't tested it in a while so don't know if it has the same problems as the original.