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Comment by gavinsyancey | Hacker News Reader

There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.

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I built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/

This is really nice. It's _almost_ useful for identifying features from where one stands, if it had another three levels of zoom and another three levels of voxel resolution.

I tried adding more resolutions, but had to balance it against cost of hosting. Each resolution is at least 2x the size of the combined all prev zoom level data. Currently I’ve 9 zoom levels total size 15gb, adding 1 more level takes it to 32gb but looks beautiful. With the current open data, I can generate upto 14 levels

Yeah, that's a pretty classic tradeoff. Thanks for hosting what you do!

Just in case you are interested, you can recreate this locally using the open source repo. The script downloads the open data and generate the voxels based on configuration. The max resolution is configured which you can increase. Just a few prompts and you can recreate high resolution upto 10m resolution in real world distance. :)

Thanks, I might do that. If so, I'll PR a config option. Thank you!

I will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.

Probably your best bet -- EASA has worldwide cloudless imagery [1] (scroll down for a link to their tile server) as well as a worldwide high-resolution elevation model [2]

[1] https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/news/2024-2-27-exploring-new...

[2] https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/APIs/SentinelH...

It's somewhat old, but NASA has its SRTM height-map dataset. I wrote a project for reading this in Python many moons ago, in case it is of help to anyone:

https://github.com/adamcharnock/python-srtm

I originally used it for doing line-of-sight calculations for a wireless ISP I started.

Europe LiDAR data: https://sonny.4lima.de/

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