17 replies to this topic

[frax]

Sorry Hans, for repeating the same message in your post, I didn't read that closely enough... It is very possible to have shaded relief and hypsography separate in Arc. If you have photoshop, I would actually do the shading (and even hypsography) in there.

I like Alex Tait's tutorial on shaded relief in photoshop, that is a regular reference for me.

I don't think ArcScene (3d analyst) would help you very much, unless you want to do an oblique view. I think you would have to give up on the quality then too (since all outputs would be raster, and RGB - if I am not mistaken...)

[MapMedia]

Hopefully someone has an example image to show how it can be done- this would help.

As mentioned, my eyes are wide open on this one too.

[Charlie Frye]

My experience is that there is no easy fix for this. My first check would be to verify the DEM is properly georeferenced and projected (including verifying that no datum shift issues have occured).

Most vector road data fails to match most imagery and elevation models. It's a fact of life. At this point most of these data were just not compiled with the intent to work together; a specific combination is usually what it takes in terms of intentions.

For my local area, I found a decent DEM and ortho imagery, while they match quite well, there were places that did not. A good test is to generate contour lines and see how well they reinforce what you see in the imagery. However, none of the local vector data was any good by either the imagery or DEM. As more and more high-resolution elevation models are produced, this problem will become obvious to more people. People should not expect road data that is compiled for 1:24,000 or 1:100,000 scale use to work nicely against a 2 meter resolution LiDAR based DEM at 1:5,000 scale.

To make my situation work, I reshaped all the road vectors and captured new edge of pavement data based on my imagery; I now have data worthy to use to make maps.

To address the problem Jillita originally brought up, I typically make the roads (lines or polys) 35-40% transparent. That way enough of the terrain shading is picked up within the roads to make them appear as seated within the terrain. In doing that it is often good to make the roads a shade darker as the transparency will wash them out a bit.