Finally tried my hand at GIS in Blender, using this great add-on called Blender GIS (!!). Pretty fab because of how easy it is to add elevation data, roads, features, buildings. I decided to look at Brooklyn, which may have been a bit too data/building heavy for a start. (Hoping to check out a more interesting terrain tomorrrow).
My attempt at texturing the building rooftops did not go well, so I ended up defaulting to a simpler material. (Again, hoping to give this another try tomorrow, with a less data-intensive location).
I looked at these two brief tutorials: