3D Terrain
3D terrain changes how the map surface is rendered by introducing elevation data into the scene. When 3D terrain is enabled, Icon Map Slicer uses a digital elevation model (DEM) - a dataset of height values for the Earth's surface - to deform the otherwise flat map into a realistic, textured landscape. This lets the map show hills, valleys, and mountains in their correct shapes and relative heights, rather than as 2D contour lines or shaded relief. Used in conjunction with hill shading, it can be used to great effect.
Sources
Several elevation models are built in, and you can also supply your own.
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| Mapterhorn | A global elevation model, the highest resolution of the built-in options. |
| Icon Map | The original global elevation model, tiled to zoom 9. |
| Icon Map version 2 | The same model tiled to zoom 12, for more detail as you zoom in. |
| Icon Map Catalog | A ready-built high-resolution elevation dataset picked from the Icon Map Catalog - no URL to paste, and attribution is applied for you. Datasets include the United Kingdom at 1 m and the Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg at 0.5 m. Premium datasets need your Icon Map licence key to be entered in the visual; without one, no terrain is drawn. |
| Custom Raster DEM | Your own elevation data, hosted anywhere reachable over HTTPS. |
Supported formats
Choose the Encoding that matches your data.
| Format | Encoding to choose | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mapzen Terrarium RGB tiles | Mapzen Terrarium | A {z}/{x}/{y} PNG tile template. |
| Mapbox Terrain-RGB tiles | Mapbox Terrain RGB | A {z}/{x}/{y} PNG tile template. Icon Map Catalog elevation datasets use this encoding. |
| PMTiles archive | Either of the above | Paste a pmtiles://… URL, or a URL ending .pmtiles, holding tiles in either encoding. Only the tiles in view are fetched. |
| ArcGIS elevation service | ArcGIS elevation service | The URL of an ArcGIS ImageServer whose service data type is elevation. Each tile is requested as a 32-bit float GeoTIFF through exportImage and converted for display, so the full precision of the source is kept. The service must expose the Image capability. |
| Greyscale relief tiles | Greyscale relief tiles | A {z}/{x}/{y} template of 8-bit greyscale tiles where the grey level maps linearly onto elevation. Set Min elevation and Max elevation to the range of the data. This is an approximation, and greyscale tiles that are a shaded relief picture rather than height values cannot produce correct terrain whatever the settings. |
Single GeoTIFF / COG files and files held in OneLake are supported in Icon Map for Fabric, but not in the Power BI visual.
Sizes and limits
- Tile Size. For terrarium and Mapbox terrain-RGB sources, set the tile size of your tileset - typically 256 or 512. ArcGIS and greyscale sources are converted to 256 pixel tiles internally, so the setting is hidden for those.
- Max detail zoom. Caps the zoom level at which an ArcGIS or greyscale source is sampled; above it the map smoothly interpolates rather than inventing detail. Leave it at 0 for the default, which is zoom 18 for ArcGIS and zoom 14 for greyscale. Greyscale relief is too coarse for close-in 3D and looks spiky if uncapped.
- Elevation range. Heights from -11,000 m to 9,000 m are carried; no-data pixels are treated as sea level.
- Dataset size. There is no practical limit - tiles and PMTiles archives are fetched a few at a time as you move the map, and the elevation datasets we publish ourselves run to well over 100 GB.
- Hosting and CORS. The Power BI visual has no server-side proxy, so any custom DEM host must allow cross-origin requests (
Access-Control-Allow-Origin) and, for PMTiles, range requests. Built-in and catalog sources are already configured for this.
Exaggeration
Controls how strongly the elevation is applied. Higher values make the relief more pronounced; lower values flatten it towards a normal map.
Format references
The formats above are open specifications published by others: