5 replies to this topic

[kjmcgrath]

Greetings!

I am a student at the University of Wisconsin studying cartography and physical geography. I am particularly interested in terrain representation I hope to have a few questions answered.

This coming semester I am working on an independent study course in which I will focus on terrain representation. I plan on reading Imhof's book Cartographic Relief Presentation and looking at the work of Imhof, Patterson and others who produce shaded reliefs. What other resources could you suggest for someone in my posistion?

I plan on experimenting with manual techniques for creating Hillshades both on paper and in photoshop, what tips or tricks have otehrs found usful when starting out?

I've seen Tom Patterson's excellent shadded relife site and reliefshading.com and was wondering if anyone could think of any other resources for a very beginner and others for when I get the hang of it. Some of these tutorials and posts show what seems to me refienment of hillshades done in arc or the like. I have dones some reasonalby good looking hillshades using arc and Patterson's bump mapping technique so I am not completely new to the topic using a GIS.

When you create shaded reliefs are they frequently done in Arc or some other GIS suite and then touched up in photoshop or is there another method? primarily manually in photoshop? What other techniques or processes are important for someone interested in terrain representation? overlay topo maps on dem? creation of dem from topo? others?

I am trying to fit as much as possible into this next semester to become competent at producing maps with (hopefully) good looking terrain.

Thank you so much for you time. Any and all advice or suggestions that you could give to an aspiring cartographer would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again!

Be Well

Edited by kjmcgrath, 14 July 2008 - 12:17 PM.

[DaveB]

I think you have an excellent start there with the basics and the masters, which should lead you to more resources and practitioners.

One thing you might consider if you can swing it is attending the NACIS meeting in Missoula in October. I don't know what is on offer this year, but you can usually find several people who know a lot about the subject there, often with a paper or three being presented. The Practical Cartography Day preceding the main meeting also often has a few choice tidbits from the likes of Tom Patterson.

Then there's the Mountain Cartography conferences. I haven't had the pleasure of attending any myself, but probably someone around here can tell you more.

[Hans van der Maarel]

One thing you might consider if you can swing it is attending the NACIS meeting in Missoula in October. I don't know what is on offer this year, but you can usually find several people who know a lot about the subject there, often with a paper or three being presented. The Practical Cartography Day preceding the main meeting also often has a few choice tidbits from the likes of Tom Patterson.

I can only agree with this. NACIS, and PCD, often have some very interesting presentations on this topic. I'm sure the preliminary programme will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

[Agnar Renolen]

When you create shaded reliefs are they frequently done in Arc or some other GIS suite and then touched up in photoshop or is there another method? primarily manually in photoshop? What other techniques or processes are important for someone interested in terrain representation? overlay topo maps on dem? creation of dem from topo? others?

There are several freeware and shareware that you can use to generate DEM's. (See www.releafshading.com). Personally, I preffer MacDEM.

I use MacDEM to produce a number of gray-scale images with different sun angles that I use as layers or layer masks in Photoshop. I also provide a number of mask files for forest, glaciers and other features that I like to integarte into the background image. The final photoshop files tends to have 20-or-so layers (sometimes even more), that quickly becomes 1Gb for a map of 70x100cm at 200DPI. I export the map as a single-layer CMYK EPS file that I place in the background of an illustrator file.

Tom Patterson is also doing it this way (more or less, I believe). You can learn a lot on his techniques from his tutorials.

Manual relief shading, I think, is an obsolete technique, but is worth trying as an excercise, if not else, to get a better understanding on the weaknesses of analytic methods.'

When it comes to rock hachures (if that is important), manual methods is still the way I believe...

Agnar

[Matthew Hampton]

To round-out your semester - you might want to spend some time studying terrain creation with digital volumetric (3D) landscape software (Bryce, NSD, VNS, etc.) as well as physical terrain models (z-corp, solid terrain modeling, etc.).

Why limit yourself to 2 dimensions?

[Charles Syrett]

The sources you mentioned are definitely the best, and to those I would add http://www.reliefshading.com/ , which describes the need to manually enhance the image sometimes. (For example, sometimes the fastest and most effective way to bring out a feature that runs parallel to the light direction is simply to edit it manually using Photoshop's airbrush tool.) I would also suggest really studying the works of the masters (Tom's site has lots of links for this). I particularly enjoy the late Erwin Raisz, who hand-rendered, in black lines, exquisite portrayals of relief to bring out its "character" -- almost like "caricatures" of the land.
http://www.shadedrel...s/gallery2.html
http://www.raiszmaps.com/
Also excellent (and still active) is Tibor Toth: http://www.tothgraphix.com/index.html
Note his entirely Photoshop airbrush-rendered drawing of Everest: http://www.tothgraph.../MtEverest.html
It's hard to imagine anything like this being done just using data!

Happy studies!

Charles Syrett
Map Graphics
http://www.mapgraphics.com