shade function

Hill shading

Compute hill-shade from slope and aspect layers (both in radians). Slope and aspect can be computed with function terrain.

A hill-shade layer is often used as a backdrop on top of which another, semi-transparent, layer is drawn.

shade(slope, aspect, angle=45, direction=0, normalize=FALSE,
   filename="", overwrite=FALSE, ...)

Arguments

• slope: SpatRasterwith slope values (in radians)
• aspect: SpatRaster with aspect values (in radians)
• angle: The elevation angle(s) of the light source (sun), in degrees
• direction: The direction (azimuth) angle(s) of the light source (sun), in degrees
• normalize: Logical. If TRUE, values below zero are set to zero and the results are multiplied with 255
• filename: character. Output filename
• overwrite: logical. If TRUE, filename is overwritten
• ...: additional arguments for writing files as in writeRaster

See Also

terrain

References

Horn, B.K.P., 1981. Hill shading and the reflectance map. Proceedings of the IEEE 69(1):14-47

Examples

f <- system.file("ex/elev.tif", package="terra")
r <- rast(f)
# disaggregating because the resolution of this raster is a bit low
# you generally should not do that with your own data
r <- disagg(r, 10, method="bilinear")

slope <- terrain(r, "slope", unit="radians")
aspect <- terrain(r, "aspect", unit="radians")
hill <- shade(slope, aspect, 40, 270)
plot(hill, col=grey(0:100/100), legend=FALSE, mar=c(2,2,1,4))
plot(r, col=rainbow(25, alpha=0.35), add=TRUE)

# A better hill shade may be achieved by combining 
# different angles and directions. For example

hh <- shade(slope, aspect, angle = c(45, 45, 45, 80), direction = c(225, 270, 315, 135))
h1 <- Reduce(mean, hh)
h2 <- mean(hh)