TerrainShade

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

Under The Hood

The two technologies that make this possible are:

1. the elevation tiles provided by Mapzen (https://mapzen.com/blog/elevation/)
2. the ray shading capabilites of three.js

Other than that, the app is built with modern javascript tools - ES6, React, webpack.

Running

To run the app on your local machine, you need the npm command line tool, which comes with an install of node.js:

• 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/