Looks great, congrats! I have worked on the same sort of project on (and mostly off) over a while, but didn't get as far as having a nice UI on the front etc. I'd started in WebGL but then moved to a back-end server using CUDA and separate front end (mostly as I wanted to learn a bit about CUDA at the time). What did you use for your source of height data? I'd used some free LiDAR data but didn't find high resolution free LiDAR data for Scotland.
EDIT: I found your blog, so can see you used e.g. https://osmbuildings.org/documentation/data/ for buildings. I'd looked at that also but found the data a little sparse and also not so accurate, but its possibly improved since, and does look good on the rendering.
I use Mapbox terrain RGB [1]. A good free alternative is Nextzen [2], but they do not generate tiles past zoom level 15 (Mapbox does it to 20) and there are some random elevation spikes that Mapbox has cleaned up.
I'm looking forward to a LIDAR elevation tile set becoming available because it can be loaded into Shademap without any modification and hopefully display shade from trees.
Interesting, thanks, I'll have a look at Mapbox terrain RGB.
Will be interesting to see the resolution of a LIDAR tile set if Mapbox are going to have one, I've found that I could sometimes find low-resolution free data (5M / 10M etc), but that higher resolution 25cm/50cm/1M etc was often commercial and very expensive, but that gives much more accurate results in city areas. I'll have a look at Nextzen also.
Are there current plans for a lidar derived surface elevation tile from mapbox?
Even the USGS 3DEP program only offers preprocessed DEMs (that is, DTMs). I can see generating that sort of thing at ~5-10m resolution on a global scale from satellite imagery / photogrammetry.
A global or even regional DSM would be quite a product.
EDIT: I found your blog, so can see you used e.g. https://osmbuildings.org/documentation/data/ for buildings. I'd looked at that also but found the data a little sparse and also not so accurate, but its possibly improved since, and does look good on the rendering.