16:9 frame / Fisheye 180° / full circle / disc 6×
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Preparing the terrain, the bridge, and a sky full of possibilities.
Choose any date from 1900–2100, place a camera on or around the Golden Gate, then trace the sun through a defined lens projection. Camera position drives the solar calculation.
A six-face scene capture is sampled by a spherical lens model. Equidistant uses r = fθ; equisolid uses r = 2f sin(θ/2). The circular field of view is measured edge to edge, up to 220°. Rectilinear uses a conventional perspective camera.
Physical mode uses a fixed mean angular diameter of 0.533°. Larger disc settings are explicit graphic scales and are recorded in exports. The rendered sun uses geometric elevation, without atmospheric refraction.
Solar positions follow NOAA / Meeus equations. Times use America/Los_Angeles, including 23- and 25-hour daylight-saving days. Sunrise and sunset use −0.833° against a level horizon; local obstructions are not included in those event times.
The bundled Mapzen terrain keeps approximately 18 m samples around Marin and the Golden Gate, adds 35 m samples on Mount Tamalpais and downtown, 18 m across northwest San Francisco and Golden Gate Park, and a compact 9 m Presidio/Fort Point patch. A 140 m regional layer transitions to a roughly 280 m Peninsula/East Bay backdrop. Grid spacing does not imply survey accuracy.
Street paths, building footprints and park boundaries use City and County of San Francisco / DataSF open data. The building survey dates to 2010, with selected newer landmarks added as nominal envelopes. Modern Bay Bridge alignment and Oakland terminal/crane locations use © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Building heights use source measurements or tags where available; missing heights and landmark shapes are estimated. Vegetation clusters illustrate mapped woodland rather than individual surveyed trees. See the urban data sources and dates and terrain provenance.
The Golden Gate Bridge includes towers, cables, suspenders, deck, walkways and bracing, with a nominal deck surface at about 77 m above sea level. The Bay Bridge includes two western suspension systems, four towers, a central anchorage, two road decks, the eastern self-anchored suspension tower and the Oakland skyway. Structural dimensions follow HAER drawings and MTC references; member profiles and approaches remain approximate. Ground mode follows terrain. This is a camera and light previsualization model, not a survey.
Mapped terminal footprints and crane positions locate the docks, container yards and gantry loaders. Crane structures, boom angles, quay levels and container stacks are nominal models, not a current operational inventory. See port source data and attribution.
The Bay Lights by Leo Villareal occupy the northern cable plane. This model uses a simplified emissive surface with an original deterministic animation and adjustable brightness. It follows simulated dusk and dawn; it does not replay the artwork, historical outages or measured light output.
The sky numerically integrates single scattering through a spherical atmosphere with Rayleigh scattering, aerosol scattering, ozone absorption, and Earth occlusion. Its linear HDR map supplies the same sky illumination used by scene materials; a separate physical Sun casts shadows. Haze is an authored aerosol scenario. Multiple scattering, polarization, refraction, and measured atmospheric conditions are not included, so twilight brightness and the Belt of Venus remain approximate. Preview shadow maps have finite range and resolution; path tracing resolves visibility against the modeled geometry.
The seasonal cycle uses 17,475 valid routine hourly observations at SFO from 2023–2024 in the NOAA Integrated Surface Database. Low visibility and low cloud ceiling frequencies guide the daily and annual timing. SFO is a station proxy, not a measurement at the bridge; density, layer heights, and spatial coverage are artistic. Low fog deck and Elevated stratus are composition presets with a sharpened inversion cap, not measured weather. The deck is easier to see from above; an observer inside it sees fog.
The fog layer drifts with wind and follows the selected time in exports. We researched the GOES Fog/Low Stratus satellite archive for a future observation-driven spatial layer. Satellite pixels are not yet ingested, so this version does not reconstruct actual weather on a historical date.
NOAA harmonic predictions set water level at station 9414290 and currents at SFB1203 bin 18, at a nominal 9.1 m prediction depth. Tide height uses mean sea level; current direction is where water flows toward. These independent point predictions are not measurements or a spatial flow field. Wind-driven waves are an authored scenario with current advection. Missing predictions use mean water level and zero current, explicitly recorded in exports. Bay-wide eddies, river discharge, storm surge, and channel bathymetry need a hydrodynamic model such as NOAA SFBOFS, which is not ingested here.
Export timestamped MP4 or WebM movies, PNG stills and sequences, a linear HDR sky EXR, or path-traced linear EXR stills and sequences. The path tracer includes geometry visibility, reflected and bounced light, and a bounded approximation of the fog volume. It always uses the physical 0.533° Sun and omits guide traces and enlarged markers. Preview sun and trace passes preserve alpha in PNG; movies have no alpha. Linear EXR excludes display exposure and tone mapping. JSON records camera, lens, solar position, lighting, and ocean state; CSV records per-frame timing and solar coordinates.