Blender
Blender (blender.org) is a free and open source 3D platform. It supports 3D modeling and rendering as well as many advanced features like animation, simulation, compositing, motion tracking, video editing and game creation.
Rendering OSM data
- the blender-osm addon provides one click download and import of OpenStreetMap and real world terrain data into Blender
- alternatively you can also convert OSM data with OSM2World to .obj files and import those into Blender. See the guide by n0toose.
Learning Blender
The best way to get to get familiar with Blender is to watch and repeat Blender Beginner Tutorial Series created by Blender Guru, the most popular and respected author of tutorials for Blender with more than 600 thousand subscribers at his Youtube channel. The total duration of 10 videos of the Series is 5 hours 10 minutes. After practicing the Series you should be pretty fit for many projects in Blender.
Alternatively or additionally you can study the first sections of the wiki-book Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, namely:
- Unit 1: Background (all sections)
- Unit 2: Basic Modeling and Shading (sections 2A, 2B, 2C)
If you are going to write plugins for Blender in the Python programming language, refer again to the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro
Blender Guru offers many free intermediate Blender tutorials. You can find them at his website blenderguru.com.
Other notable authors of free video tutorials for intermediate user of Blender are: