Hakuba Valley Map

Hakuba ValleyA SANSUI JOURNEY · SOUTH TO NORTH

N ↑ ALONG THE SHIONOMICHI

Terrain: the real height field of the Hakuba Valley (AWS Terrain Tiles, Terrarium, open data, zoom 13), 70 m grid, carried into the page as a two-channel image and redrawn for every camera position.
Hidden lines, live: a floating-horizon pass from near to far decides what the eye can see, the idea of ln by Michael Fogleman (MIT), run here in the browser on each frame.
Brush, noise, foliage: stroke(), blob() and Perlin noise adapted from Shan Shui Infinite by Lingdong Huang (MIT, © 2018); the Perlin code there is itself from p5.js.
Map layers: forests, villages, building footprints, roads, rivers, ski runs and lifts from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), draped on the same height field.
The road: the camera follows the valley floor from Lake Nakatsuna north to Shirouma, the line of the Shionomichi, the old Salt Road from the Sea of Japan to Matsumoto.
Composition: written for Lycia: layered mist (kasumi), spear-mist bands (suyari-gasumi) drawn with a single thin gold outline, Tōhaku pines, seals; everything is placed in the world, so near trees pass quickly and the far Alps barely move.

Preparing the valley…