If you’ve ever wanted to create realistic, real-world terrain inside Blender without sculpting everything by hand, MapNG is an incredibly powerful (and free) tool to add to your workflow.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use MapNG to generate terrain data and import it into Blender 5.1, apply textures, and get a clean, usable landscape for rendering, animation, or environment design.
Step 1: Download Terrain
1. Open MapNG in your browser
2. You’ll see a world map interface where you can click and drag around the map to find the terrain you want to use
3. In the bottom right corner, you can choose satellite to better see what the terrain looks like
4. You can change the resolution for the exported maps
5. The orange square shows you what you will be exporting
6. When you have your selection made, click on generate data
7. Scroll down to the ready to export section
8. You have a few different options to choose from
9. For this tutorial, we will be exporting the Satellite data – this will provide the texture
10. You can then use various options for the mesh – in this tutorial, we will use the GLB model
Step 2: Import into Blender
1. Drag-and-drop the GLB file into Blender
2. You may need to tab into edit mode and do some cleanup on the mesh
3. Add a new material
4. Drag-and-drop the downloaded texture into the shader editor and connect it to the principled shader
Conclusion Using MapNG with Blender opens up a fast and powerful way to create real-world terrain with minimal effort. You can generate highly detailed elevation data and textures directly from real locations—completely free.