rayshader

This is an R package designed for producing beautiful and interactive 2D and 3D visualizations — especially maps and terrain renderings — using elevation/gridded data and ray-tracing / hill-shading methods. At its core, rayshader takes a matrix of elevations and applies shading, texture, ambient occlusion, overlays, and light modeling (ray shade, lambertian shading, etc.) to produce realistic relief maps. Users can rotate, zoom, and animate the scenes or script camera trajectories programmatically. It supports outputting high-quality renders via path tracing (using a companion package) and also offers depth-of-field (“cinematic blur”) effects to bring visual focus into scenes. It allows layering relational data (roads, points, polygons) on top of the shaded terrain, so you can combine spatial data overlays with the 3D model. The package can export models to 3D formats like STL or OBJ for 3D printing or external rendering.