Shaded Relief Maps in Blender

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by jblindsay on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:11PM (#28749577)

These blender-based shaded relief images have been popping up a fair bit in the geomatics space recently. I really love them, but they are fairly complicated to make. I developed the open-source geospatial platform WhiteboxTools (developed in pure Rust) to help with tasks like this. You can create multi-scale hillshade images with it and the type of shadow model displayed above as well with one click:

https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...

Better yet, you can create a dynamic shadow model based on a DEM using the ShadowAnimation tool:

https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/Guelph_Shadow_Animation/shadow_a...

multidirection hillshade: https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...

TimeInDaylight tool: https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/manual/wbt_book/available_tools/...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by xemoka on Monday October 04, 2021 @02:32PM (#28750466)

Thank you John for your work with WhiteBoxTools, I was introduced to it when a former student of yours entered our GIS program at Selkirk College a couple years back and have been keeping one eye on it since.

You've got some really excellent algorithms and tools in WBT, I've used them to shortcut some obnoxiously long lidar/pointcloud processing with other packages.

I'm not sure that this is "less complicated" than the linked tutorial though, but some great exploration for someone who knows a little more ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by jblindsay on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:06PM (#28752089)

@xemoka Thanks for the kind words. I will respectfully disagree about the level of complication involved though. In this case, you simply open the ShadowImage tool, specify your input DEM, choose a palette, name the output and press run. I realize that there is a lot of GIS knowledge that is required in many cases, but this one is fairly straight forward to run.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by jblindsay on Monday October 04, 2021 @01:17PM (#28749671)

Here are some more examples of the dynamic shadow models, that you may enjoy:

https://whiteboxgeo.com/Shadow_Animation/small_farm_shadows_...

https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/Shadow_Animation/Kitchener_shado...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by wcarss on Monday October 04, 2021 @07:54PM (#28753898)

As a one-time guelphite, seeing the University of Guelph in that TimeInDaylight tool link caught me quite off guard!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by hoseja on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @03:01AM (#28756293)

Thanks! I've been looking for an accessible explanation of the hillshade algorithm, without much success.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shaded Relief Maps in Blender by folli on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @05:27AM (#28757088)

This explanation is also quite nice: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/3d-a...

[ Parent | on HN ]