TerrainShade is an interactive web application that lets you see where there's sun and shade for any location on earth at any time. At least that's the goal.
- When will the sun hit my favorite crag and make climbing unbearably hot?
- When should we stage our family photo in order to get that awesome low angle light?
- When is the sun going to hit the slope and turn the firm snow into mush?
These are the questions that TerrainShade will help answer.
###Live Demo
The two technologies that make this possible are:
- the elevation tiles provided by Mapzen (https://mapzen.com/blog/elevation/)
- the ray shading capabilites of three.js
Other than that, the app is built with modern javascript tools - ES6, React, webpack.
To run the app on your local machine, you need the npm command line tool, which comes with an install of node.js:
In the root directory, install the dependencies with:
$ npm install
This will download and install the dependencies in ./node_modules
Compile and bundle the code:
$ npm run bundle
This will start a process that watches for changes to the source code and creates a new bundle in ./dist whenever changes are detected.
Now you need to serve the index.html file and view it in your favorite browser. I use the SimpleHTTPServer that comes with Python:
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
which serves the app at http://localhost:8000/