3 replies to this topic

[erik]

I have done a fair amount of research on bump mapping vegetation onto shaded relief, including many posts on CartoTalk. I'm really excited by articles like Tom Patterson's "Getting Real: Reflecting on the New Look of National Park Service Maps". I've used the first part of the texture substitution technique in previous maps to get landcover coloration blended with shaded relief, but not the texture part. From what I can tell, the texture aspect in that article involves ERDAS which I don't have. The second challenge is locating high resolution landcover data for Portland.

The shaded relief covers a dozen miles of territory but will need to be high res. enough for a 60" wide map print.

However most of the examples I'm finding were all done on PCs with ARC* or some other Windows tool.

I can't justify ARC or any other multi-thousand dollar toolset for the project I am working on for a non-profit org. Even a cheap ARC license is not going to work out without a high powered PC, which again is not in the budget.

I have the following tools:

Cartographica 1.24
Natural Scene Designer 5 Pro
GlobalMapper 13 (running on VMware Fusion)
Adobe CS5
Mac with 16GB of RAM

Any ideas for an approach with these or other Mac tools?

--erik

PS--I would really love to do this all in a specific one of the above products which I won't name. However I can't seem to even load the Lidar data in to get started. I think it's too big of a dataset for the application's memory handling.

[dsl]

PS--I would really love to do this all in a specific one of the above products which I won't name. However I can't seem to even load the Lidar data in to get started. I think it's too big of a dataset for the application's memory handling.

Global mapper should be able to load the data and then export it to another format and reduce the resolution so it isn't as large of a file. For a shaded relief you don't necessarily want something to detailed anyway.

It looks like Natural Scene Designer pro allows bump mapping, perhaps you can use that to generate the relief?

HTH,
David

[erik]

Thanks for the reply... I'm not sure I've tried using GlobalMapper's texture map layers. I have had good luck with it loading my entire Lidar dataset and draping an aerial photo over it so I will look for some documentation of how to use the texture capability.

I forgot to mention that I've used Bryce for some shaded relief renderings before too. However it is quite time consuming to deal with its unique qualities (including no georeferencing).

erik

[Michael Schmeling]

Bryce should be able to do what you want.

You could also look into the Vue product line ( e-on software )
which is available for the Mac and can do some amazing landscape rendering. No georeferencing though.