25 replies to this topic

[Pete]

Hi all -

These are the first couple in a series of maps for a city centre development brief.



It's all made in Illustrator CS2 with the 3d extrude and rotate tools. I tried to allow for perspective in the 3d modelling but there were far to many building polygons to carry out the necessary manual adjustment after extruding them so there is no foreshortening and the projection is purely isometric but I've employed just about every other trick I can think of to give the impression of depth in the illustration using shading and depth-cuing.

As always any feedback is much appreciated!

- P

[Hans van der Maarel]

I seem to have deleted the wrong post Could you please re-upload your attachments?

[Pete]

Not to worry ... here they are:

 blank.jpg   217.23K   138 downloads  centre_policy.jpg   215.22K   110 downloads

[Pete]

Some updates to the maps and layouts:

 blank.jpg   498.39K   53 downloads

[Pete]

 centre_policy.jpg   503.2K   31 downloads

[Pete]

 listed_buildings.jpg   545.12K   121 downloads

[DaveB]

The labelling could use some work, I think. Why is the River Ness label upside down? And the labels for the train station and some other features are at an angle (parallel to the left edge of the map?). There seems to be plenty of room to place those more horizontally for easier reading.

[Jacques Gélinas]

Neat map.

My first question would be, why a perspective and not just a plan?

[Pete]

Thanks guys -

The labelling could use some work, I think. Why is the River Ness label upside down? And the labels for the train station and some other features are at an angle (parallel to the left edge of the map?). There seems to be plenty of room to place those more horizontally for easier reading.

Ah ... you spotted it then Dave ! The annotation was all aligned to the bottom of the map - or south as in a typical north-south aligned orientation. It would have appeared normally had the map not been rotated into the projection you see in the attached images where the annotation of the river seems upside down and the buildings are all 45 degrees out. Some of the street names (the two to the right of the River Ness annotation) share the same problem. I'll just have to rotate the text to it appears better once the transformation has been carried out - bit of an oversight on my part .

Here's a blank map with the annotation better aligned ...

 blank.jpg   498.59K   61 downloads

Neat map.

My first question would be, why a perspective and not just a plan?

Thanks Jacques! Reasons for the perspective instead of a normal plan may include but are not limited to ... experimentation, visual impact, curiosity, the challenge, showing off and an instruction from my overlords to come up with something different than the usual "planning maps". I was hoping to create the sort of appearance you'd associate with those tabletop scale models of developments that you sometimes see - don't know if I nailed it exactly.

[DaveB]

Much better!

(Inverness is one of my favorite places that I have visited)

[Pete]

Inverness is one of my favorite places that I have visited

Really ?! I've lived here all my life (not picked up the accent though!) so I'm a little jaded to it all but it's always interesting to hear what people that are passing through think of the place .

Anyway, I've revised the maps to show a wider area because of the need to include some different information than I had orginally planned for. On the plus side I did get another chance to go back and refine some of the effects.

Here they all are ...

 inverness.JPG   611.27K   33 downloads

[Pete]

 centre_policy.jpg   629.06K   17 downloads

[Pete]

 listed_buildings.jpg   657.72K   26 downloads

[Pete]

 action.jpg   627.31K   28 downloads

[Pete]

 process.gif   957.98K   32 downloads

The whole thing was put together from an export of MasterMap data from ArcMap to Illustrator.

First of all, two polygons were made in Illustrator which might be thought of as a sort of dtm and a dsm - basically one land ploygon without bridges and one with, respectively. A singel blue square was rotated isometrically to colour the water and the land without bridges was extruded to a depth of 10pt and rotated isometrically to form the bottom layer or land. The blue square was copied and inserted above the land with a transparency applied to create the surface of the water. The land and bridges shape was extruded and rotated as before and aligned to sit above the water in line with the shape below. Aligning extruded shapes is a simple matter of manually nudging each polygon up or down as long as the shapes all conform to a single extent - in this case the square that forms the base of the map.

Once the basic form of the "model" has been created the flat texture was applied ground by rotating a copy of the MasterMap data into the same projection and nudging it up until it covers the surface of the land. It speeds things up significantly if you expand the map polygons into a single compound path for each element rather than trying to rotate large numbers of shapes.

The buildings were derived from the MasterMap export by expanding the building polygons into compound shapes based on area (more on that later) and extruded to a depth of 5pt in the same isometric projection as before and nudged into position. Extra details such as shadows and highlights were made based on the same building footprints and the same isometric projection but were only rotated, not extruded, and placed under or on top of the buildings.