Ross McDonald's presentation on different ways of rendering an elevation model as a hill shaded or texture shaded image. Presented at 6th Scottish QGIS UK user group meeting.

1. them thar hills
shadin’, texturin’, blendin’
Ross McDonald @mixedbredie

2. Take one DEM
Intermap 10m DTM

3. Add a colour gradient

4. Make a hill shade
Note the hatching effect caused by live hill shade renderer

5. Multiply blend

6. What is texture shading?
An alternative shaded relief technique
Based on fractional Laplacian algorithms
Emphasises drainage network
Highlights the visual hierarchy
Developed by Leland Brown
Open source under BSD 2-clause
www.textureshading.com
Mac and Win binaries, compile on Linux

7. Take one DEM

8. Workflow
Convert GeoTIFF to GridFloat
gdal_translate –of EHdr –ot Float32 in.tif out.flt
Generate a texture
./texture 2/3 out.flt texture.flt
Export a GeoTIFF
./texture_image +2.0 texture.flt texture.tif

9. Texture shaded DEM

10. Coloured in

11. Blended with hill shade

12. Without texture shade

13. Blender 3D
OS Terrain50 DTM
See https://wanderingcartographer.wordpress.com/ for workflows

14. Uses the BlenderGIS addon - https://github.com/domlysz/BlenderGIS

15. Comparison
QGIS/GDAL
Quick
Easy
QGIS Raster menu
QGIS Live renderer
(press F7 in 2.16)
Render artefacts 
Texture Shading
Download required
Easy to use
Some prep needed
(Float32 DEM)
Memory dependent
Nice effect
Use alone or blend
Blender
Separate app
Steep learning curve
More prep needed
(Int16 DEM)
RAM/CPU/GPU
dependent
Slow but lovely
Realistic lighting

16. Inspiration
http://www.shadedrelief.com/
http://www.reliefshading.com/
https://wanderingcartographer.wordpress.com/
http://mapzilla-art.co.uk/
https://owenpowell.wordpress.com/
http://www.mapsmith.net/
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/
https://cartoblography.wordpress.com/
http://christopherwesson.azurewebsites.net/