rayshader

0.41.2

Create Maps and Visualize Data in 2D and 3D

5packages depend

43.8Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

11/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Tyler Morgan-WallFirst published 2018-08-3116 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Uses a combination of raytracing and multiple hill shading methods to produce 2D and 3D data visualizations and maps. Includes water detection and layering functions, programmable color palette generation, several built-in textures for hill shading, 2D and 3D plotting options, a built-in path tracer, 'Wavefront' OBJ file export, and the ability to save 3D visualizations to a 3D printable format.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("rayshader", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("tylermorganwall/rayshader")

Development version from tylermorganwall/rayshader. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-rayshader

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-rayshader

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

2WARNING11OK

Failing flavors

WARNING r-oldrel-windows-x86_64
WARNING r-release-linux-x86_64

Slowest check: 5.8 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Check history

WARNING2026-06-13
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 1 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-06-08
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-06-07
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-04-25
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-04-22
12 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Show 2 earlier snapshots

ERROR2026-04-18
11 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-03-10
12 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

Documentation signals are not tracked yet for this package.

Downloads

43.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #2,800 · ~120/day · ~3.6K/mo

rayshader Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

1.9K30 days

6.3K90 days

43.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on553 r2u28 autocran2.4K conda_forge

Repository

GitHub ↗ tylermorganwall/rayshader

2,171Stars

220Forks

42Open issues

6Open PRs

0Releases

557Commits

8Contributors

557 commits · Last activity 2026-07-24 · +0.2% stars, 30d

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 4 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/tylermorganwall/rayshader on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsTravis CI

Docs source (1)

README.Rmd

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

Governance and community (1)

Issue templates

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

36 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 4.1

Imports (18)

doParallel foreach Rcpp progress raster scales png jpeg rglgrDevicesgridutilsmethodsterrainmeshr rayimage rayvertex rayrender magrittr

LinkingTo (3)

Rcpp progress RcppArmadillo

Suggests (19)

reshape2 viridis av magick ggplot2 sf isoband car geosphere gifski ambient terra elevatr gridExtra testthat osmdata raybevel (>= 0.2.1)ragg skymodelr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

5direct

0indirect

hillshader PoweREST fitbitViz ggseg3d rayrender

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Tyler Morgan-Wall

Author, Copyright holder, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Tyler Morgan-Wall

Author, Copyright holder, Maintainer

Tyler Morgan-Wall

Author, Copyright holder, Maintainer

Package Timeline

16 releases. R releases are shown for context.

0.41.2Latest
2026-07-20 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.37.3
2024-02-21 · diff ↗
0.35.7
2023-06-13 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
0.24.10
2021-04-28 · diff ↗
0.24.5
2021-04-11 · diff ↗
0.19.2
2020-08-02 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.15.1
2020-04-18 · diff ↗
0.13.7
2020-01-25 · diff ↗
0.13.2
2019-12-18 · diff ↗

Show 9 earlier events

0.13.1
2019-11-12 · diff ↗
0.11.5
2019-07-11 · diff ↗
0.11.4
2019-07-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.10.1
2019-02-20 · diff ↗
0.10.0
2019-02-18 · diff ↗
0.5.1
2018-09-11 · diff ↗
0.4.7
2018-08-31
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23

Package metadata

First published: 2018-08-31
Total releases: 16 / 8 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Download size: 2.7 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Appears in task views

Analysis of Spatial Data

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