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Comment by tylermw | Hacker News Reader

Author here, I wrote this to show how you can use the rayshader package to generate 3D maps in R using free and open data (in this case, Landsat 8 imagery and SRTM elevation data). You can check out rayshader's Github repo here:

Github: https://www.github.com/tylermorganwall/rayshader

And browse the documentation (with rendered examples) and README on its website: https://www.rayshader.com

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Cudos to this code and the beautiful artwork (great README file for a github repository, btw). As somebody who worked a bit in visualization in scipy and blender, I can appreciate how much hard work have been put there. I did visualization as a small side project during my astrophysics PhD, and it was a pain in the ass to get anything good looking out of the data.

Thanks! I always enjoy when a library has a solid README with examples, especially when it's a visualization library. Wanted to make sure I had one myself.

Today there is a nice GIS plugin for blender which makes life much easier:

https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS/blob/master/README.md

On a side note - you don't know a free tile server that serves elevation tiles, do you?

Mapbox has an API you can query from--I believe they have a free tier. The `ceramic` package makes this easy to pull from, but you need to get a Mapbox key first:

https://github.com/hypertidy/ceramic

Additionally, the `elevatr` package (https://github.com/jhollist/elevatr) serves tiles directly from AWS Open Data Terrain Tiles. I don't believe it requires a key.

Here are a couple more ways to get SRTM tiles:

- OpenTopography (also has 3DEP/LIDAR data): https://portal.opentopography.org/datasetMetadata?otCollecti...

- SRTM 30M tile tool: https://dwtkns.com/srtm30m/

Related: in my masterclass (free and open source, materials here: https://github.com/tylermorganwall/MusaMasterclass) I also walk through how you can convert LIDAR data into hi-res DEMs to generate 2D and 3D maps

Unfortunately, SRTM 30M tile tool is asking for credentials for me.

You can also query elevation tiles using the `elevatr` package and use them in a similar way.

The Mapzen elevation tilesets are on S3:

https://www.mapzen.com/blog/terrain-tile-service/

https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/

This is the best option for free terrain tiles. There are four formats, though "Terrarium" is the most used. It maps RGB pixels in a PNG to raw elevation values using this formula [0]. If you're using Mapbox GL, you can just point your map to [1] to fetch the tiles, and then use it as a hillshade. I do that in my topographic map style [2].

[0]: https://github.com/tilezen/joerd/blob/master/docs/formats.md...

[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/elevation-tiles-prod/terrarium/{z}/...

[2]: https://nst-guide.github.io/osm-liberty-topo/

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