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Pyramid Shader

Pyramid Shader is a specialized application for visualizing terrain models and other digital raster data.

Pyramid shader can create:
  • Shaded relief
  • Illuminated and shadowed contour lines (“Tanaka contours”)
  • Hypsometric colors
  • Local hypsometric colors
  • Exposition colors
  • Bivariate colors
  • Slope
  • Aspect
  • Profile curvature
Pyramid Shader can generalize terrain by removing small high-frequency details and/or large landforms.

Download

Pyramid Shader is free and open-source software. The latest version is 1.1.1 and is available as Windows exe file and as Java JAR file. Mac and Linux users can launch Pyramid Shader wit the terminal: "cd" to the directory containing PyramidShader.jar, then to launch the app, type:
Java -jar PyramidShader.jar
Pyramid Shader requires Java 8 to be installed.

Tutorial

See this excellent tutorial by Charles Preppernau to get started with Pyramid Shader.

Data Import

Pyramid Shader reads Esri ASCII grid files. We recommend the free QGIS or Landserf software for converting to Esri ASCII grids.

License

Pyramid Shader is free open source software © 2014–2021 by Bernhard Jenny, Charles Preppernau and Jim Eynard, all formerly at Cartography Group, Oregon State University.

You can download, modify and redistribute the Java source code and derived products under the terms of the MIT License.