consider a hillshade pipeline

[andrewharvey]

User Story

In order to allow OpenStreetMap mappers to improve map data of features like mountain peaks, waterways, cliff lines, tramping tracks and more, as a maintainer of https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index I want to include a hillshade elevation layer and/or detailed contours layer.

Currently Topo50 has contours, but the resolution is not great compared to the LIDAR derived data.

I can see the basemaps tiles/elevation service delivers terrain-rgb and color-ramp tiles currently. OpenStreetMap editor software like iD and JOSM don't nativly support this format, so it can't be directly used by editors without us running a TiTiler proxy (which we could do, OSMF already has the infrastructure running for this). color-ramp doesn't reveal fine details so isn't that helpful for users trying to trace features.

By the way I couldn't find any documentation for the pipeline parameter and had to dig through the code to find the supported values. I had a chuckle when I saw the terrain-rgb displayed on basemaps.linz.govt.nz directly as RGB since the format was never designed to be directly visualised this way.

[dwsilk]

Hey @andrewharvey, thanks for raising this. We are working on generating nationwide hillshades internally which Basemaps will then be able to serve via regular raster XYZ / WMTS. The OSM community is one of the key customers we identified as being a potential consumer of this.

I had a chuckle when I saw the terrain-rgb displayed on basemaps.linz.govt.nz directly as RGB since the format was never designed to be directly visualised this way.

Yea, if we published a hillshade render via terrain-rgb on LINZ Basemaps we would have got a whole bunch of "how do I get this to work in <software-that-doesn't-support-terrain-rgb>?" .. we wanted to ensure we had raster XYZ / WMTS services available before doing that.