Yes, blender already has glTF support https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.5/addons/import_export/...

It's slightly more complex than that. This is in 3D Tiles format which uses GLTF but I don't think you can simply grab a GLTF from an API endpoint. It's been sliced into cubes with hierarchical level of detail and other things I barely understand.

You can simply just grab the glTF! Here's Google's doc page on making requests to the .glb (binary version of glTF) https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/create...

Oh that's interesting. You probably still need to jump through hoops to figure out the right url for the grid square and level of detail you need. And the session parameter - so you still need to make the initial tile request to get the JSON.

They’ve built a set of framework-agnostic loaders to help sort out which tiles to request for any given viewport https://loaders.gl/docs/modules/tiles

All of the data loading and parsing can be done in loaders.gl, check out the repo 3D-tiles examples for a good place to get started.

You presume I'm doing this in a browser. :-)

I'll have to parse the json myself but it looks doable.

Do a little googling and you can probably find code on github to take care of the "get me terrain for these coordinates" part for you. That's how I managed it a few years ago when I was programmatically downloading tiles from google earth without understanding how to convert from coordinates to their url scheme.

Might have to wait a week though.

Please let me know if this worked for you!

I was wondering the same, would be interesting to be able to 3d print models of cities.