Hillshade

The hillshade layer displays the topography of a region by simulating how light would illuminate the terrain. It categorizes areas into discrete groups based on the intensity of illumination, with each group represented as a polygon feature.

The hillshade layer offers an aesthetically pleasing representation of terrain characteristics, facilitating comprehension of the regional topography. For example, this makes hillshade beneficial in tourism-related use cases by helping outdoor enthusiasts, such as hikers, cyclists, and backpackers, plan routes by showing changes in elevation and rugged terrain.

You can request the hillshade layer by adding the following parameter to your query: content=default,hillshade. For more information, see Optional content.

📘

Note

The order of attributes in the content parameter is important. Specifically, ensure that you position the default attribute as the first one.

The following figure shows a comparison of vector maps without and with the hillshade layer:

The layer content has the following definition:

• Layer name: hillshade
• Geometry types: polygon

Hillshade properties

Each hillshade feature has the following properties:

• kind - The intensity levels split into two groups groups: shadows and highlights.
• level - The intensity levels categorized under kind are further divided into different categories. This offers more detailed information about intensity levels through the kind property.
• sort_rank - A value used to prioritize the display order of different types of landuse features on the map. A feature with a higher sort_rank value is displayed on top of a feature with a lower sort_rank value. The value for all hillshade features is 199.

Hillshade kind values

The kind property specifies the hillshade feature type, according to its intensity level.

• shadow - The polygon denoting the shaded portion of the terrain, where the map area should appear darker when rendered.
• highlight - The polygon denoting the highlighted portion of the terrain, where the map area should appear brighter when rendered.

Hillshade level values

The following values indicate varying degrees of shadow and highlight intensity.

• -3 - Strong shadow.
• -2 - Medium shadow.
• -1 - Light shadow.
• 1 - Light highlight.
• 2 - Strong highlight.

The polygons with different shadow levels overlap, with each stronger shadow polygon contained within a lighter one, with the same pattern observed for highlight polygons. This approach enables the rendering of varying degrees of shadow and highlight by displaying hillshade geometry as semi-transparent polygons layered on top of each other.

Next steps

• For more information about other layer feature types available in the HERE Vector Tile API, see Tile Layers.