Procedural terrain studio · real elevation data

Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon as seen from Mather Point, rebuilt entirely from code: satellite elevation data, a perspective camera and hidden-line removal, rendered live in your browser in six print styles. Orbit the mountain, move the light, repaint it, and save a 3000×1000 header.

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Camera
Light
Ink & detail
Ornaments

Photo guide marks roughly where an X / Twitter profile picture overlaps a header. It is never included in the saved PNG.

How it's made

  1. Terrain. A 512×512 grid of real elevation (SRTM-derived terrain tiles) around the mountain is embedded in this page, about 90 m per sample.
  2. View. The grid is resampled along the line of sight from Mather Point, rotated by the orbit angle, into rows running away from the viewer.
  3. Light. Surface normals from the height gradient give a shade for every point; a snowline and slope test decide where snow sits.
  4. Hidden lines. Rows are projected near to far with a perspective camera. A "floating horizon" per pixel column hides anything behind what's already drawn; the same buffer tells every pixel which bit of mountain it shows.
  5. Style. That one buffer drives everything: engraved ridgelines, true 40 m contours, pointillist dots, riso halftones with misregistration, or a woodcut with carved lines that widen in the light.

Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM / public sources). Rendering: plain Canvas 2D, no libraries.