Overlay uses the tones of the hillshade to brighten or darken the underlying content. This is a traditional (single light source) hillshade with an overlay blend mode. Then I created a hillshade from the oblique elevation layer, using Raster Functions. To warm it up a bit, I duplicated the layer, gave it the “inferno” color scheme, and applied a “soft light” blend mode to merge its hues to the layer below, and increase contrast. The resulting oblique DEM layer is given a terrain color scheme (“elevation #8”). This map is comprised of 9 layers, all of them the same oblique elevation source layer, each with a color scheme and/or blend mode to cook the stacked result into something touchable. I’d love to see it someday with my own eyes.īut mainly this is a story of blend modes. This section of the Great Rift Valley, in Ethiopia, has an impossible assortment of interesting landforms and is one of my favorite places to terrain-ify. I set it to 25 degrees, which had a nice tilty effect. 0 degrees is like sitting on the horizon with mega extreme stretching. 90 degrees is a top-down look and will pretty much have no effect. The Plan Oblique tool has one parameter: inclination angle. The result is a modified elevation model (a NASA SRTM digital elevation model image, given a UTM projection) that gives the impression of looking slightly sideways at terrain. Developed by Bernie Jenny and Bojan Šavrič, based on some beautiful hand-wrought oblique examples from mapping’s rich history, it is a wonderfully sneaky way of vertically warping elevation data so that pixels are pushed “up” commensurate with their elevation. It uses the Plan Oblique tool, available in the glorious set of Terrain Tools for ArcGIS Pro, released by Ken Field some time back.

Ah shadow complex map