Making 3D Terrain Maps (2017)
shadedrelief.com
shadedrelief.com
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.
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/...
People willing to put in manual effort can get amazing results.
The folks trying to make tools should be reading Patterson (and Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation, and so on) and trying to make their tools produce output closer to the best work done by expert craftspeople.
We use WebGL to create Procedural Maps, which are created from a combination of real terrain data, vector features from OSM along with procedural generation, all coming together to make a beautiful 3D map.