Terrain Viewer

Overview

What Terrain Viewer is and how the sidebar is organized

Terrain Viewer is a browser-based terrain and historical-imagery visualization tool built on MapLibre GL via react-map-gl. Every setting lives in the URL query string, so any view is shareable as a plain link.

Hillshade + Elevation Hypso + Raster Basemap over the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin) massif

Hillshade + Elevation Hypso + Raster Basemap — Matterhorn (Mont Cervin), Alps

Elevation Terrain Visualizer is a browser-based terrain visualization/export tool built on MapLibre GL (React + TypeScript + Vite, pnpm).

Two main modes:

  1. Terrain mode — pick a source (Mapterhorn, Mapbox, MapTiler, AWS Mapzen, or your own COG/GeoTIFF), render with many relief techniques (hillshade, hypsometric tint, contours, slope/aspect/curvature, TRI/TPI/roughness, sky-view-factor/openness, LRM, an experimental mound detector called "Tells"), in 2D/3D/Globe, exportable as GeoTIFF/screenshots/QGIS templates.
  2. Historical Imagery mode — scrub a per-tile capture-date timeline across providers (ESRI Wayback, Google Earth Historical, Landsat/Sentinel HLS, Planet, Bing), with N-way grid/split compare and CSS-blend-mode overlay.

The two headline features

Terrain Visualization Modes — every relief technique the app has, stackable and independently tunable. See Terrain Visualization Modes for the complete guide (equations, dev-page deep dives, per-mode controls):

Base Layers

Hillshade ↗Hillshade visualization mode, with its Hillshade controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Elevation Hypso ↗Elevation Hypso combined with Hillshade, with its Elevation Color controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Contours + GeoGrid ↗Contour lines, with the Contours & GeoGrid controls panel open — Matterhorn massif

Terrain Analysis

Slope ↗Slope visualization mode, with its Terrain Analysis controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Curvature ↗Curvature (Profile / Flow Acceleration) visualization mode, with its Terrain Analysis controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
TPI ↗Topographic Position Index (TPI) visualization mode, with its Terrain Analysis controls panel open — Matterhorn massif

Relief Visualization

LRM ↗Local Relief Model (LRM) visualization mode, with its Relief Visualization controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Sky-View Factor ↗Sky-View Factor (SVF) visualization mode, with its Relief Visualization controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Openness ↗Openness visualization mode, with its Relief Visualization controls panel open — Matterhorn massif

Light

Phong ↗Phong lighting visualization mode, with its Lighting Effects controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Matcap ↗Matcap lighting visualization mode (Clay Brown material), with its Lighting Effects controls panel open — Matterhorn massif
Hard Shadows ↗Hard Shadows visualization mode, with its Lighting Effects controls panel open — Matterhorn massif

See Terrain Visualization Modes for the full writeup of every mode above.

Historical Imagery — a per-tile capture-date timeline, and any grid layout up to 4×2 for comparing providers/dates side by side. Below, a 2×2 grid mixes Google Earth Historical, ESRI Wayback, and a live Bing pane over the same Paris rooftops across four different capture dates:

Historical Imagery grid mode, 2×2, mixing Google Earth Historical, ESRI Wayback, and a live Bing basemap across four capture dates

Historical Imagery, Split Mode Side (2×2) — Paris — open in app ↗

See Basemaps & Historical Imagery for the four providers behind this and how the timeline works.

  • General Settings — View Mode (2D/3D/Globe), Split Mode (Off/Overlay/Side, up to an 8-view grid), Project import/export
  • Visualization Modes
  • Bookmarks
  • Sources — Terrain and Basemap, including the combined Basemaps & Historical Imagery entry
  • Options / Tools — per-mode option panels, Drawing, Elevation Picker, Animation, Source Info

Where to go next

Feature Overview

A map of what's in the sidebar

On this page

The two headline featuresSidebar groupsWhere to go next