Rayshading Adelboden

Here you can find some code examples of my exploration of Tyler Morgan-Wall's amazing rayshader package for R. My approach was heavily inspired by Will Bishop's blog post I can rayshade, and so can you.

Short version of code_adelboden.R

Goal

Creating a 3-dimensional image of my favourite ski holiday destination Adelboden.

Approach

• We download the latest shapefiles of the municipal boundaries from the website of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office.
• We access different types of elevation data: SRTM 90m and SRTM 30m of NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and we create an even more fine-grained elevation model (10m) with Google's Elevation API (5 USD per 1000 requests, total costs of ~ 25 USD).
• We use rayshader for a three-dimensional spatial visualization of Adelboden's 88,2 km².

• We download a suitable aerial image via the ArcGIS REST API using Will Bishop's get_arcgis_map_image function.
• We printscreen an arial image from the map of the Swiss Federal Geoportal, assign it georeferences and crop it to the appropriate size.
• We overlay the rayshaded 3D visualizations with the aerial images.

• We add georeferenced labels and render a video of the scenery.

And...it's a wrap!