Minimalist Faux 3D Relief Map Renders

Over the past year I’ve become somewhat interested in visualisations of maps and terrain representations, and in particular “artistic” renders of relief maps. I’ve tried making a couple of different types of renderings of maps in some form or another over the past few years with varying degrees of success, and over the past few months I’ve been progressively creating what I’m terming “Minimalist” relief maps, where a surface is displaced by a Digital Elevation Model terrain height map (often to an exaggerated extent compared to real-word scale) with fairly simple shading, but using light and shadows as a key element to provide a sense of the terrain topology and height in a stylistic way.

These maps are a lot less manual-labour intensive to set up than the previous historical topographic ones I tried which required a lot of manual warping of the DEM images to match up with the historical map, so there’s a lot less effort (on my part anyway) to generate these more minimalistic style ones, and I still find them very nice to look at.

I’ve experimented with various different types of shading, with the main two types I settled on being the diffuse colour mapped to a colour gradient, driven by:

• the terrain height value (the Y coordinate height in worldspace)
• the occlusion ratio in a hemisphere around the shading point

The latter of which I think I like best (and is what both renders above show) as it allows nice highlighting of the edges and gradients of steeper terrain, although it means the stronger colours are generally in darker more occluded areas which hides it a bit, and the renders are slower as well, as additional raytracing to calculate the surface point occlusion needs to be done during shading.