A section of a USGS topographic quadrangle map from the Grand Canyon
3D Topo Maps in Facebook
May 25, 2020

I was watching videos on Intel Realsense devices the other night and noticed a little detail in one of the videos on making a 3D image Facebook post, and quickly came up with a workflow to create a 3D USGS Topo.

The technique I came up with works really well for areas with a lot of variation in elevation, but would look really weird in places that are relatively flat. I did try a post with imagery, however unlike an illustrated map, imagery has issues when the user pans around.