Technique overview:

• Create a map in QGIS with some flavor of base later data (USGS land cover, in this case)
• Work in a custom CRS that's in meters, to make units match up later...
• Export png of map while noting the exact extent of the map boundaries (in the CRS reference frame)
• Also grab altitude data, exporting that with the same extents as a geotiff (so it can keep 16 bit depth for altitude)
• Decide on a time frame and speed of the movie
• Walk through the data and aggregate all the ADS-B data from one "frame" of the animation
• Apply the CRS to the (GPS) lat lon, so the units well be consistent with the map layer
• Export these points as CSV, one line per frame, and a list of x/y/alt separated by |
• In Blender:
• Create a plane, subsurface it and apply the map texture (color) and a displace using the elevation tif file
• Using the Animation Nodes plugin build a node tree that reads from the csv file, splits on line, gets the line of the current frame number, then copies a cube for every x/y/z tuple.
• Render camera moves, etc.

This is a very rough early sketch in Blender of being able import arbitrary data that matches a textured map.

Technique overview:

• Create a map in QGIS with some flavor of base later data (USGS land cover, in this case)
• Work in a custom CRS that's in meters, to make units match up later...
• Export png of map while noting the exact extent of the map boundaries (in the CRS reference frame)
• Also grab altitude data, exporting that with the same extents as a geotiff (so it can keep 16 bit depth for altitude)
• Decide on a time frame and speed of the movie
• Walk through the data and aggregate all the ADS-B data from one "frame" of the animation
• Apply the CRS to the (GPS) lat lon, so the units well be consistent with the map layer
• Export these points as CSV, one line per frame, and a list of x/y/alt separated by |
• In Blender:
• Create a plane, subsurface it and apply the map texture (color) and a displace using the elevation tif file
• Using the Animation Nodes plugin build a node tree that reads from the csv file, splits on line, gets the line of the current frame number, then copies a cube for every x/y/z tuple.
• Render camera moves, etc.

Whew. Hopefully I can refine this and write a full explanation one day.

Map overlay with each received point colored by reported altitude.

Tools:

• dump1090 for the data
• matplotlib and cartopy to generate the map and display data
• ffmpeg to crop and animate