Urtopis

[arakish]

I have been gone from these forums for quite a while. Work and college just took too much of my free time. Now that I have earned my Masters, I have a little more free time to work on cartography. A life long hobby.

I have been working on a new map using the color relief shaded style. I also generated a graticuled map with only the coastlines.

Click image for larger view


Click image for larger view


To make this map, I used real world DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) downloaded from the Seamless Server. Of course, finding the desired DEM can be time consuming. I spent over three whole days finding the DEM used for the above map. I then used ArcMap at work to generate and export three images: Hillshade, Colored Relief, and Terrain.

Since ArcMap is so expensive ($5000/yr minimum), I am looking into methods for using FOSS4G software since it is free (excepting time spent downloading, installing, and learning). Hopefully, I can figure out these methods. And perhaps make tutorials?

The three ArcMap generated images were then loaded into Photoshop. Photoshop was used to trim off the white borders generated by ArcMap. I then exported the Terrain image into a greyscale PNG which was used in Wilbur to generate the rivers. I then put the hillshade image under the colored relief image, then applied a 20% transparency to get the hillshade to show through slightly and give a 3D terrain simulation.

I then used NBOS Fractal Mapper to generate several land shapes which I then merged into a single land shape. This land shape was used to create a mask in Photoshop to get the land shape as seen in the above map. Of course, you could use AutoREALM to generate land shapes.

Afterwards, it was all Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro to generate the above map. This is still definitely a WIP since now I need to add the cultural, societal, etc. features.

Thanks for any criticisms and/or praise. Feel free to post either or both.

rmfr