How do I create a map symbol from an aerial foto?

[Redrobes]

One of the things I used to do is walk along a path and take photos straight down in front of me. Then you can clip out loads of path icons and put them into random orders to make long paths which look great. Blend the edges down to transparency and it works when you overlap them. A lot of times you can photos straight down without a drone but trees are the hard ones to get. You can often find cliffs and high places where there is a cottage below you or something of interest. Or even if you could not get straight down on to an old cottage you could usually get enough of the roof to use as a texture. I used to go to garden centers and take photos of their exotic plants and clip them out and scale them up to be weird fantasy plants. But having drone footage can really help. Many historic sites in the UK specifically prohibit the flying of drones over them so be mindful of the regulations in place in your country / site.

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/...drone-filming/

If you do manage to get permission to fly over somewhere with especially good building or site that you want in 3D then do look into Photogrammetry as well. My blog on this site is all about it, click the number "7" to the left. Currently the star program is Meshroom.

https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom

[Tiana]

For trees, you can easily fudge them by photographing smaller plantlife and then using the branches to assemble something with smaller leaves, or, take photos of bonsai trees!