
Making 3D Terrain Maps (2017) - nkurz
http://shadedrelief.com/3D_Terrain_Maps/
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Animats
This is how to make 3D terrain maps "by hand", or with a lot of manual labor.
Not how to use Mapbox or Cesium-JS to make an interactive map. "It is very
costly to change, say, the direction of view, in the final stages of map
production. Changing the direction of view by even one degree would mean
starting over from scratch."

I've been trying to do 3D terrain maps in Mapbox, and real elevation isn't
working yet. They only have "hill shading", which is what graphics people call
bump mapping. They have an experimental project to use Three.js with Mapbox,
which looks very nice, but it's just a demo right now. Cesium-JS supposedly
can do 3D elevation maps, but I haven't tried it yet. These all produce live
"slippy maps", like Google Earth - you can pan, zoom, rotate, and change the
viewpoint.

~~~
trynewideas
See also ArcGIS API for JavaScript, specifically SceneView:
[https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-
code/...](https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/intro-
sceneview/index.html)

Zoom in on a place, switch from pan to rotation, and look around.

There's also a more dramatic example:
[https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-
code/...](https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/scene-
toggle-elevation/index.html)

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jamiethompson
The flat-earthers are gonna have a field day with some of these.

