Digital elevation models - the GeoTIFF rasters behind GIS, simulation,
and mapping - turned into interactive level-of-detail 3D terrain. This is
a WebGL showcase: the terrain is real elevation processed
by the project's pipeline, with the rendering reimplemented in the browser.
The actual engine is the C++/Qt/OpenGL desktop app.
DRAG TO ORBIT · SCROLL TO ZOOM · UPLOAD YOUR OWN DEM
About this project
Geospatial Terrain Importer ingests real-world
elevation data and turns it into interactive, level-of-detail 3D
terrain. It ships as a C++/Qt/OpenGL desktop application plus a headless
Python pipeline.
This page is a showcase, not the engine itself. The
built-in terrains are real output of the project's pipeline, but the
in-browser rendering (mesh build, LOD, hillshade, GeoTIFF upload) is a
WebGL/JavaScript reimplementation of the same techniques. The actual
engine is the C++/Qt desktop application.
What you're looking at
A digital elevation model (DEM) is a raster where every pixel
stores a ground height in metres. The built-in scenes come from the
public AWS Terrain Tiles open dataset (SRTM/NED-derived); each
is a real ~59 km-wide patch of the planet. You can also upload your
own GeoTIFF and it is parsed entirely in the browser.
The pipeline
Ingest a GeoTIFF DEM via GDAL, with bilinear resampling and nodata/NaN sanitisation.
Build a mesh - a triangulated height-field with per-vertex normals and texture coordinates.
Simplify with Quadric Error Metrics (Garland & Heckbert 1997) and boundary preservation.
Generate an LOD pyramid - multiple resolutions selected by camera distance.
Drape a texture - hillshade / elevation colormap here; packed satellite tiles in the app.