piece-of-cake-terrain 0.1.2

Build interactive 3D terrain HTML scenes from DEMs, rasters, vectors, and configurable map styles.

Piece of Cake

PyPI package | GitHub release

Piece of Cake builds interactive 3D terrain scenes from DEMs, rasters, vectors, and configurable geospatial styles.

It is deliberately focused on the 3D model. Give it a DEM and optional layers, then export a clickable HTML file or display it in a Jupyter/Colab notebook.

What It Does

• Builds Plotly-based 3D terrain from a DEM.
• Drapes custom raster layers on the terrain.
• Draws vector overlays from GeoPackages, shapefiles, GeoJSON, or other GeoPandas-readable formats.
• Lets users click the terrain to capture latitude, longitude, and elevation.
• Exports standalone HTML.
• Supports custom style profiles for unknown layers.
• Helps inspect unknown raster/vector layers before styling them.
• Can fetch DEMs from configured provider sources such as OpenTopography.

Install

For the lightweight core:

pip install piece-of-cake-terrain

For geospatial raster/vector IO:

pip install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo]"

For YAML source configs and provider-backed DEM download:

pip install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo,providers]"

For notebook display:

pip install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo,notebook]"

For place-name lookup:

pip install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo,places]"

From GitHub source:

pip install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo,places,providers] @ git+https://github.com/WhatsThisClint/piece-of-cake.git@v0.1.2"

For an isolated terminal command:

pipx install "piece-of-cake-terrain[geo,places]"

With uv:

uv tool install piece-of-cake-terrain --with rasterio --with geopandas --with pyproj --with shapely --with geopy --with PyYAML

Quick Start

from piece_of_cake import TerrainScene

scene = TerrainScene.from_dem(
    "data/dem.tif",
    bounds=(76.1, 18.0, 76.4, 18.3),
    title="Dharashiv Terrain",
)

scene.add_raster(
    "Tree Canopy",
    "data/tree_canopy.tif",
    style={
        "type": "continuous",
        "label": "Tree canopy (%)",
        "cmap": "Greens",
        "opacity": 0.65,
    },
)

scene.to_html("dharashiv_terrain.html")

From the terminal:

piece-of-cake render --dem data/dem.tif --out dharashiv_terrain.html --title "Dharashiv Terrain"

You can also start from a place name when the optional places extra is installed:

scene = TerrainScene.from_place("Dharashiv, Maharashtra, India")
scene.add_dem(path="data/dem.tif")
scene.to_html("dharashiv_terrain.html")

Unknown Custom Layers

Piece of Cake does not assume what a custom layer means. Inspect it first:

from piece_of_cake import inspect_raster, inspect_vector

inspect_raster("custom_tree_canopy.tif")
inspect_vector("villages.gpkg")

For a GeoPackage with many columns, choose the column explicitly:

scene.add_vector(
    "SC/ST share",
    "villages.gpkg",
    column="sc_st_pct",
    label_column="village_name",
    hover_fields=["village_name", "population", "sc_st_pct"],
    style={
        "type": "continuous",
        "cmap": "Reds",
        "opacity": 0.55,
    },
)

DEM Sources

Piece of Cake supports local DEM files, custom provider hooks, and configured provider sources such as OpenTopography.

scene = TerrainScene.from_bbox(76.1, 18.0, 76.4, 18.3)
scene.add_dem(path="/content/drive/MyDrive/DEM/India.tif")

Fetch a DEM automatically from OpenTopography:

scene = TerrainScene.from_bbox(76.1, 18.0, 76.4, 18.3)
scene.add_dem(source="opentopography", width=500)
scene.to_html("terrain.html")

Use an IHEWAcollect-style YAML config for accounts and named sources:

accounts:
  opentopography:
    api_key_env: OPENTOPOGRAPHY_API_KEY

default_dem: opentopography_cop30

sources:
  opentopography_cop30:
    provider: opentopography
    dem_type: COP30
    cache_dir: .piece-of-cake/cache

scene.add_dem(source="auto", config="sources.yml")

Or plug in your own provider:

scene.add_dem(provider=my_dem_provider)

See docs/providers.md.

Beginner Course

A self-contained Jupyter course is available in course/. It includes 15 beginner-friendly notebooks covering DEM terrain, HTML export, bounding boxes, DEM providers, raster drapes, custom styling, vector overlays, and a mini diagnosis dashboard. The notebooks use synthetic local data and do not require Drive files or public data downloads.

Terminal Commands

piece-of-cake --help
piece-of-cake render --dem data/dem.tif --out terrain.html
piece-of-cake inspect-raster custom_tree_canopy.tif
piece-of-cake inspect-vector villages.gpkg

If Windows cannot find piece-of-cake because Python's Scripts folder is not on PATH, use:

python -m piece_of_cake --help

See docs/cli.md.

PyPI Publishing

The package is published on PyPI as piece-of-cake-terrain. Publishing uses GitHub Actions and PyPI Trusted Publishing; see docs/publishing.md.

Citation

If you use Piece of Cake in research, reports, or public-facing tools, please cite it using the metadata in CITATION.cff.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.