Poly-Peaks: Every hill around Kappel, named
Type the place you stand and get its whole skyline back as a low-poly print, with each hill's name in the sky above it.
Kappel, on Freiburg's south-eastern edge, all the way round: north through east to south in the top strip, south through west back to north below. Seven hills named, the Kandel 13 km away among them. 2000 × 1414 px, the shape of an A-series sheet.
Kappel sits in a side valley at the south-eastern edge of Freiburg, about 375 m up, with hills on every side. Stand in the village and turn once. Which of those ridges is which, and is the Kandel, 1,242 m high and 13 km to the north-east, even in view?
Poly-Peaks answers that for any place PeakFinder knows. Below is how the panorama above came out of five settings, starting from the app's first try. Open this exact panorama, press Load saved panorama or Generate Panorama, and follow along.
How this one got made
Type a place, wait a minute
Type Kappel, Freiburg im Breisgau into Location and press Generate Panorama. The app looks the place up, then asks PeakFinder for the full circle as seen from there: its shaded relief, the skyline, and every summit it can name. Here that took 48 seconds. Once the capture is in, the settings below redraw in a few seconds at most.
Name in, coordinates out: the address is found at 47.9647° N, 7.9087° E and 375 m, and the capture starts.
Two strips, and sky above the hills
The first render is grey and crowded. A full circle is far wider than any sheet, so the app cuts it into two strips and stacks them. Alpine guidebooks printed their panoramas in strips the same way. At the default Vertical scale of 1.0 the hills fill each strip to its top edge, and a name that cannot be drawn whole above its summit is left out. The app says so under the preview: here, one of the five names it picked.
Open Print layout, set Vertical scale to 0.7 and press Apply layout. The hills flatten, and sky opens above them for the names.
To fill a landscape sheet, one strip would have to stretch Kappel's hills 11.84 times. Two strips need 2.96 times but leave one of the five names out; Vertical scale 0.7 brings the stretch down to 2.07 and gives every name room.
A finer skyline brings the Kandel back
Now look for the Kandel under Peaks to label, the first control in Peak labels. It isn't there, and neither is the Rosskopf. At the default Simplification of 0.30 the line keeps 31 of the 290 points PeakFinder traced, and the app only names a summit where the simplified line still has a corner. I tied the names to the corners on purpose: a summit the line has smoothed away would be a name over a straight stretch.
Open Tools and lower Simplification to 0.15. The line keeps 50 points, one of them lands on the Kandel, and both hills join the list. Add them.
The circle marks the Kandel on each line. At 0.30 the nearest kept corner is too far off to carry its name; at 0.15 there is one right on the summit.
The same rule holds for the other two choices under Horizon style. Soft and Sketch round the skyline off and name only the summits the rounded line keeps, and at their default 40 arrows the Kandel and the Rosskopf drop out again. This piece stays Low-poly.
One skyline, three hands. Low-poly keeps the corners, Soft rounds them, and Sketch draws the rounded line three times with a wobbling pen.
The names are in Sans, the default, because Laubisköpfle needs an ö and the brand face Karoshirt has none. All seven are in plain sight from the village. When one of your names is not, the note under Peaks to label says it is "behind nearer ground". PeakFinder only names what it can see, so the app asks it twice, the second time from higher up. From that second look I take only names; the hills and the skyline always come from where you stand.
Bigger facets read as hills
The hills themselves are triangles cut from PeakFinder's shaded relief. Relief detail (low-poly), in Polygonised Peaks, sets their size: low is fine, high is abstract.
Relief detail 0.2, 0.6 and 0.8: 1,165, 295 and 177 facets. At 0.2 the big hill east of the village turns to texture; at 0.8 it is a handful of planes. This piece keeps the default 0.6.
Rose and gold, by height
Last, the colour. Open Relief colours. Duotone shades each facet by how much light it catches, from Shadow to Highlight. Elevation tint colours it by height instead, from Valleys to Summits, and shades it on top.
Take the colours of Kappel Rose, a published piece of the same view: set Relief colour to Elevation tint, Valleys to navy #26547c, Summits to gold #ffd166 and Line & label colour to the same navy. Then open Composite and set Background to rose #ef476f.
In Duotone most facets land on the lit end of the ramp, so the rose-and-gold hills go almost flat gold; Elevation tint runs them from navy valleys to gold summits instead.
From screen to object
Tick the terms once, in the box above the previews. Then, under Downloads, Composite (PNG) is the picture at the top of this post: 2000 × 1414 px, with a small signature in the bottom-right corner. Horizon (SVG) is the skyline alone, as one line, for importing into Buntwald as a backdrop.
The shaded relief stays on screen and out of the downloads. It is PeakFinder's own render, and shipping it would hand out their picture rather than my abstraction of it. Their data is licensed CC BY 4.0, so keep the credit with anything you share.
Two files for everyone: the finished panorama and the skyline on its own.
Other controls, one line each
Centre on a viewing direction puts a compass bearing in the middle of the panorama, so the cut falls behind you.
Bottom seal closes the lower edge of the mesh, leaves it jagged, or carves it up to hug the range.
Sliver cleanup drops the needle-thin facets along jagged edges.
Label alignment, Label tilt and Connector line decide how each name sits on its summit.
Horizon, in Composite, lays the skyline over the mesh as a line.
Bands and Orientation, in Print layout, cut the circle into up to four strips and turn the sheet to portrait.
Your turn
Order a print of this creation, under Downloads, prints the same composite on paper, without the signature.
Open this exact panorama and change one thing. Put your own village into Location, and settle which hill that one on the left actually is.
If you make one you like, send me what you made. I'll ask before showing it anywhere.