Pyramid Shader Skillshare

Hillshades with Pyramid Shader

What is Pyramid Shader?

Pyramid Shader is a free application for visualizing elevation data developed by Bernhard Jenny, Charles Preppernau and Jim Eynard.

Download and install

To install, first visit the website for Pyramid Shader and download the Java JAR file. There is also an option for Windows exe file.

To run Pyramid Shader locally, you must first install Java 8.

How to use

To open the Java application, run the following line from your terminal:

Java -jar PyramidShader.jar

Prepare your digital elevation model

Before bringing your data into Pyramid Shader, you may want to reproject your data to a better projection for your use case.

# reproject
gdalwarp -s_srs 'EPSG:4326' -t_srs '+proj=aea +lat_0=37.5 +lon_0=-96 +lat_1=29.5 +lat_2=45.5 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +ellps=GRS80 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +units=m +no_defs' -overwrite elevation_90m_usa.tif elevation_90m_usa_proj.tif

Hillshades often have too much detail, so here we downsample the DEM to half the pixel size:

# resample to a fewer pixels
gdalwarp -tr 180 180 -r cubicspline elevation_90m_usa_proj.tif elevation_180m_usa_proj.tif

Pyramid Shader only accepts ESRI ASCII files, which you can convert to in QGIS or using this GDAL command:

#convert to ASCII format
gdal_translate  -of AAIGrid INPUT_FILENAME.tif OUTPUT_FILENAME.asc
gdal_translate  -of AAIGrid elevation_180m_usa_proj.tif elevation_180m_usa_proj.asc

Now that we have our ASCII file, here's what we can do:

What you can do

1. Scale

1. Edit -> Scale Grid Values
2. Vertical Exaggeration for Shading

2. Generalize

1. Landforms removal - level of blurring
2. Details removal - amount of detail gone

Visualize

1. Exposition Color
2. Bivariate Color