Custom DEM for 3D Terrain in Mapbox GL JS V2

Question

Is there a way to use a custom DEM for 3D viewing in the new mapbox release? I can use custom 2D rasters tiled using MapTiler, so I was wondering if the same option is available for "raster-dem" then setTerrain. The goal is to create something like this, but with my own elevation data:

https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/example/add-terrain/

Thanks

Steve Bennett Steve Bennett · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-17T00:39:22

Good question. In theory, you ought to be able to produce your own raster tileset following the same Terrain RGB format like this:

map.addSource('mapbox-dem', {
'type': 'raster-dem',
'url': 'mapbox://yourusername.yourtilesetid',
'tileSize': 512,
'maxzoom': 14
});
map.setTerrain({ 'source': 'mapbox-dem', 'exaggeration': 1.5 });

However, the documentation does say:

Only supports Mapbox Terrain RGB (mapbox://mapbox.terrain-rgb):

It's unclear if they mean it only supports that format (seems more likely), or is somehow hardcoded to only support data from that exact data source (which seems a very strange choice).

Based on my very basic testing, Mapbox GL JS does attempt to fetch tiles from whatever source you provide, and doesn't give any weird error messages, but I haven't gone as far as actually producing such a tileset.

Custom DEM for 3D Terrain in Mapbox GL JS V2

1 Answers