Why This Exists
Moving the family to New Zealand in 6-9 months. Before you pack up two kids and relocate 7,000 miles, you understand the terrain. Not tourist brochure understanding—actual geometric understanding. Elevation models, hydrological networks, land cover classification, infrastructure density. This is reconnaissance rendered at 32k resolution. Plus, it's pretty to look at.
Source Material
OpenStreetMap
758,921 road segments, 8,380 railway lines,
coastlines, lakes, rivers.
Source: Geofabrik NZ Extract
Format: PBF (Protocol Buffer)
Digital Elevation Model
8-meter resolution. 131,072 × 188,416 pixels
covering 1,048km × 1,507km in NZTM projection.
Source: LINZ Data Service - 8m DEM (2012)
Format: GeoTIFF tiles → unified 98.78 GB sparse file
River Environment Classification
593,517 river segments. Strahler order and cumulative catchment area for every stream from headwater trickles to the Waikato.
Source: LINZ - nzRec2_v5.gdb
Land Cover Database
511,104 polygons classified into 33 categories. What's actually on the ground: native forest, exotic grassland, urban fabric, wetlands. LCDB v5.0 at 1:50,000 scale.
Source: LINZ - LCDB v5.0
Rendering Pipeline
Elevation Processing
Started with 9GB of compressed GeoTIFF tiles. Merged them into a single unified grid after converting from lat/lon to xyz and projecting onto a plane.
Hillshade with Organic Lighting
3×3 weighted kernel at 8m resolution, then bilinear downsample to 16m output. Multi-directional lighting because single-source illumination looks lame? primary light at 80° azimuth / 50° zenith, three fill lights, ambient term. Hypsometric tinting maps elevation to colour (warm tones low, cool tones high). It'd have been nice to render an actual environment but meh, maybe next go!
Hydrological Network
River brightness maps to catchment area via log scale. Small headwater streams at 0.02 km² up to the big arterials at 21,111 km². Gamma-mapped with brightness² for perceptual uniformity.
Land Cover Classification
33 classes rendered with custom palette. Colors converted from sRGB to linear light before compositing because additive blending in gamma space produces incorrect results.
Transportation Infrastructure
Large motorway down thru trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, residential, all the way to footpaths. Color-coded and width-scaled by classification. Antialiased polyline rendering with alpha blending.
Source
Rendering engine available upon request, didn't figure it was much worth it to post but if someone wants, lemme know!