World Effects

World Effects add lighting, depth, and atmosphere on top of your chosen basemap. Open the World Effects dialog from the ribbon.

Terrain and relief

• 3D terrain — raise the map into real elevation, with an adjustable exaggeration, so mountains and valleys read in 3D.
• Hillshade — shaded relief that shows the shape of the land, with control over the illumination direction, including lighting the terrain from the position of the sun.

Both draw from an elevation (DEM) source. The built-in Mapterhorn DEM covers the world; you can also supply your own — a raster-DEM tile template ({z}/{x}/{y}, terrarium or mapbox encoding) or a PMTiles archive — from a URL or a file in your OneLake. Tile hosts that don't allow cross-origin requests are fetched automatically through the built-in proxy.

Sky and atmosphere

• Sky — set sky and horizon colors, and optionally show stars.
• Fog — add ground fog and an atmospheric halo around the globe.
• Daylight terminator — overlay the day/night boundary with a twilight gradient, showing where it's currently light and dark across the world.

Sun position

The Sun position section simulates where the sun is in the sky, and uses it to light the map consistently.

• Live mode (the default) - the sun follows the real current date and time, so the map's lighting matches the world right now.
• Fixed date & time - turn on the toggle to pick a moment instead. A date and time picker sets the exact moment, and a time-of-day slider lets you sweep through the day to see how the light changes.

When sun position is on, it drives the other lighting effects together:

• The daylight terminator moves to match the chosen moment.
• Hillshade's Light from the sun option lights the terrain from the sun's direction.
• Optionally, Light 3D scene from sun lights the 3D scene - 3D models, buildings, and BIM models cast shadows that match the sun's position.

While these are synced to the sun, the manual sun sliders in the Lighting section are hidden - the sun position is in charge. At night, the simulated sun is clamped just above the horizon, so scenes stay visible rather than going completely dark.

Ambient effects

Icon Map can also make the basemap feel alive with decorative, data-free effects — for example, simulated traffic that drives vehicles along the real road network. These ambient effects are purely visual: they are never selectable, never appear in tooltips or analysis, and are never included in exports.

Next steps

• 3D models, tiles & scenes — add 3D content to match a 3D world.
• Themes — set the overall look of your map's visuals.