← contempl8

Relief Terrain Blocks

No account · No tracking · Drag a square, hold the landform
Famous squares
The block
Draw a square on the map — or pick a famous one below.
relief water
band brick explode detail
How it works

Relief turns any square of the world into a landform you can hold. Press Draw a square, drag a box over any terrain on Earth, and it rises off the page as an orbitable 3D block — drag to turn it, pinch or scroll to zoom, colored in the hypsometric tints printed atlases use. Draw as many squares as you like and hop between them; each stays outlined on the map with its letter.

Two bodies, one block. Bricks quantizes elevation into contour bands — each brick's height IS a contour interval, and the explode slider splits the stack into laser-cut-style strata. Mesh is the smooth shaded surface at the same scale. The water slider floods either body to any elevation, with the submerged percentage read from the true un-quantized data — try the Dead Sea square at 0 m.

Elevations come live from the Copernicus GLO-90 digital elevation model (90-meter resolution, the European Space Agency's global terrain survey), served by Open-Meteo. The default 24×24 sampling fits the free service's burst allowance so squares load in about two seconds; the finer 32×32 and 48×48 settings are worth the wait but spend time queuing politely behind its rate limit. Every square has a shareable link. Relief is the area sibling of Topo, which reads elevation along a line.