general adives on 3D rendering

[Gamerprinter]

Well I work with 3D a lot, and yes, it can be done, but what you're asking for specifically is a height map, and a specific height map at that. Working in 3D is complex, but creating height maps is actually a lot harder to do. In a height map, the lowest elevation is black, the highest elevation is white, and all the elevations in between are vaious shades of gray. It's fairly easy to take an existing height map and use it in a 3D program, but creating a height map is actually quite difficult - I cannot do it easily. I would actually create a 3D object of the forest, and the mountains and the buildings as individual 3D objects and construct the scene out of multiple pieces of 3D objects, and render it as a final scene. I wouldn't go the route of creating a height map first. You can import 3D height maps of existing Earth terrain - those currently exist. Creating custom terrain requires specific software, which I don't have access to.

Below is a height map of a mountainous region...

GP

97295-mountain2-height-map-merged.png

[Rwhyte]

If you're familiar with QGIS, there's a plug-in, Qgis2threejs, which is a great way to take 2D layers into a 3D view.

Building polygons can be extruded to their heighs by attribute. Tree points can be symbolized by 3D model trees. And in fact, trees can also be shown with 2D png images, which can do a suprisingly good job of looking like 3D objects. All these features can be placed on top of a terrain DEM as well.

Here's a quick example
QGIS23JS.JPG

If you have a polygon representing 'forest', QGIS has a tool to create random points within a polygon, and that could be used to generate 'tree' points within the forest area, which could then be symbolized by 3D symbols...

The trick would be to blend these different styles together. But, hope that can help for some ideas!