AnimatedColumnLayer

The AnimatedColumnLayer renders extruded 3D columns at point features — a bar chart laid over the map, where each column's height comes from a numeric property. It draws through deck.gl's ColumnLayer (@deck.gl/layers), one binary sublayer per tile, animated window-mode by the shared TimeFilterExtension.

It extends SpatioTemporalLayer and is instanced at points exactly like AnimatedPointLayer: the elevation column is baked into a per-feature getElevation attribute (zero-copy), NOT per-vertex. Any point archive with a numeric column works — no rebuild needed.

Installation#

import { AnimatedColumnLayer } from '@poopdeck.gl/layers';

Usage#

const layer = new AnimatedColumnLayer({
  id: 'quake-columns',
  data: '/data/earthquakes-v2/manifest.json',
  currentTime,
  timeWindow: 30 * 24 * 3600 * 1000,
  elevation: 'magnitude', // numeric column → column height
  elevationScale: 12000, // metres per unit
  radius: 6000, // metres
  fillColor: [251, 106, 74, 220],
});

Properties#

Inherits all properties from SpatioTemporalLayer.

Deliberate default drift#

radius defaults to 100, where deck.gl's own ColumnLayer defaults to 1000. The STT default is sized for the point archives this layer renders (a metro-scale bar chart, not a continental hex grid). Porting a deck config that relied on the upstream default therefore yields columns 10× narrower — pass radius explicitly. This is the only value in the column surface that diverges from upstream.

Categorical fill and lighting#

Where a categorical fillColor palette is resolved depends on extruded:

• extruded: true (the default) — the palette is expanded on the CPU into a per-feature RGBA getFillColor buffer.
• extruded: false (flat disks) — the palette lifts to the GPU via CategoryColorExtension.
• A colorMapping always CPU-expands, extruded or not.

The split is forced by the shader. ColumnLayer computes lighting before DECKGL_FILTER_COLOR — gouraud into vColor in the vertex stage, phong into fragColor under flatShading — and the extension's hook replaces rgb, so a GPU palette write on an extruded column discards the lit color and every bar renders as a flat single-tone silhouette. AnimatedPointLayer can use the GPU path unconditionally because its markers are unlit; AnimatedPointCloudLayer, also lit, makes the same CPU choice.

Behavior notes#

• Point tiles only. The layer checks each tile layer's geometryType and skips any layer that is not Point, emitting one named console warning rather than misreading a linestring/polygon vertex run as one position per feature.
• Elevation is per-feature (instanced), unlike AnimatedPolygonLayer's per-vertex elevation expansion.
• Columns are best read at a tilted, regional zoom; at low zoom a metre-radius column falls sub-pixel (the deliberate "render by space" tradeoff).
• There is no cumulative-slab path: columns are an overview/aggregate primitive, so the per-tile sublayer count never climbs the way a cumulative point reveal does.
• The sublayer short id for _subLayerProps overrides is columns.

Source#

packages/layers/src/layers/core/animated-column-layer.ts