How can I create shaded relief from contour lines (.shp format)?
I see Hillshade in ArcToolbox, but it asks for a raster file.
I have ArcGIS 10.0.
[GIS] Creating shaded relief in ArcGIS Desktop
arcgis-10.0arcgis-desktopcontourshaded-relief
Related Solutions
For relief shading in GRASS, better use r.shaded.relief. It comes by default with light from west to east. Like this (SRTM example):
For my perception the valley looks ok in this example. The colortable comes from r.colors (there are "terrain" and "srtm", see here for examples of these color tables).
What you have is a hillshade surface built from a LiDAR point cloud. According to ESRI:
A hillshade is a grayscale 3D representation of the surface, with the sun's relative position taken into account for shading the image.
So each pixel of your .tif raster has an hypothetical illumination value given a reference position of the sun.
What you want is a DEM (a bare-earth surface) where each pixel in the raster represents an elevation value. As stated by Jeffrey Evans it is not possible to backwards converting hillshade values into elevation.
The best alternative would be to try acquiring the raw LiDAR data and built the DEM from scratch. For example, see:
Best Answer
You first need to create a raster layer from your vector contour layer. You can use the Topo to Raster tool under the Spatial Analysis Tools>Interpolation toolbox (reference via vs 9.3.1 not sure if it is the same in 10). Once you have your raster layer, then you can use the Hillshade tool.