Blender Country Areas

I don't know why, but I wanted to make a quick animation showing countries ordered by area.

Data source: Natural Earth, 1:10M Admin 0 - Countries

Pre-process script (here): this script joins countries that straddle the antimeridian, calculates area using an Albera Equal Area projection with standard parallels surrounding each country, sorts the countries according to area, and saves to new geojson file. You could do some of this in Blender if you wanted.

Blender script (here): run this script within Blender to place country borders/texts, and add keyframes for moving the camera.

All that's left within Blender is to parent a sun light to the camera and create a material and apply it to all country borders/texts.

The final animation looks like this:

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to discuss this project!