Axis Maps Contours

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is 10 minute map.

My Mount Fuji map took 30 seconds.

Vibe-coding might be cheating (and perhaps even the end of civilisation as we know it), but it really can help developers create online maps very, very quickly. To create my map, I simply entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:

'I have downloaded a geojson of Mount Fuji. Can you give me the code for a three.js illuminated neon contour map. Add an animation to rotate around the center of the mountain. My geojson URL is https://mapsmania.github.io/mapchallenge/contours.geojson'

It then took me 30 seconds to download and run the resulting HTML file. Job done!

Admittedly, I had cheated a little by preparing a GeoJSON file of Mount Fuji's contours beforehand. This took another 30 seconds. I downloaded the file using Axis Maps' Contours, centering the map on Mount Fuji before downloading its contour data as GeoJSON.

So, from start to finish, my map took one minute to create.

Axis Maps Contours is a free, browser-based tool for creating customised topographic contour maps of almost anywhere in the world. Simply navigate to your chosen location and you can generate contour lines at regular elevation intervals, measured in either metres or feet. You can customise the contour intervals, line colours and weights, and choose between traditional contour lines and illuminated contours, which use shaded bands to give the impression of raised terrain. You can also add hillshading, roads and labels, or use hypsometric tints to colour the landscape according to elevation.

The resulting maps can be downloaded as PNG images, SVG vector graphics or GeoJSON files. This makes Contours useful for much more than producing conventional topographic maps. The SVG exports could be used to create printed maps, illustrations or even laser-cut terrain models, while the GeoJSON data can be imported into GIS software or used to create interactive mapping projects. As my Mount Fuji experiment demonstrates, you can also feed the exported contour data into Three.js to create animated 3D terrain visualisations.