webGL Shadows for fill-extrusion layer

[kevinsutjijadi]

Using CustomLayerInterface to generate a shadow from all rendered fill-extrusion layers. Adjustable light source altitude & azimuth, as well as shadow resolution and color.

Live url: url

Screen.Recording.2026-03-05.150536.mp4

[HarelM]

Thanks for sharing! Nice work!

[wallabyway]

Hi @HarelM and @kevinsutjijadi ,
I met with George Owen at his Esri ArcGIS for MapLibre session last week. We chatted about stuff I was experimenting with - mostly visual and 3DGS stuff in MapLibre.

Here's my first post:
https://github.com/wallabyway/maplibre-building-shadows

It's a lightweight shadows plugin for MapLibre GL JS, that merges SDF ambient occlusion with projected footprint shadows into a single custom layer. Four GPU passes, no shadow maps, no extra cameras.

There's a live demo here: https://wallabyway.github.io/maplibre-building-shadows/

Source code and explainer are all there (see docs/ *.jpg and blog/ for details).

I'd be curious to get feedback. I really don't know how to get involved in this community, but I'm curious.

maplibre-shadows-hq.mp4

[HarelM]

If you made it into a plugin, the best way to let the community know about it is write about it in slack and add an example to the examples folder in this repo.
I'm wondering if this is a common enough use case that's worth discussing bringing it into maplibre itself.
If you think it should be in maplibre not as a plugin you can open a discussion in the style spec repo to start the process of adding this functionally to the style spec and later on into maplibre itself.

[wallabyway]

Requesting permission to join Slack.

Slack Request submitted — an admin will review your request.

[HarelM]

I'm not an admin, but it should be approved in a few hours I believe. Give them time.

[wallabyway]

Got access. Thank you!