Hello,

I'm happy to have found this community after spending too much time lurking about traditional GIS folk while learning what I could for a cartography-based art/design project.

The project is to create maps that are constructed essentially from real world analytics derived from GPS tracks. These tracks are meant to be used to construct "fantasy" terrains that correlate to where I've been and how often I've been there.

I've tried a couple of approaches, one of which results in these kinds of maps generated from GPS tracks:





So, the idea is that I only see where I have been in the maps, and larger islands/continents for places that I have been more often (home/studio). These maps above basically show a couple of months of spending time around home and thereabouts, and driving up to the studio where I work.

This is satisfactory, but I'd like to go a step further and take advantage of some other tools to enhance the maps. For instance, I'd like to generate fractal terrains. I've tried creating height maps for Fractal Terrain, but that hasn't gone particularly well, I think because FT expects much more detail than I am producing, and probably some other reasons that I haven't figured out yet.

What I would expect to do in an ideal world is to run my GPS tracks (GPX data) through a pre-processor that I'd probably construct and use the output as source for some tool that would build-up the baseline fractal terrain that I could then muck with to bring it to life. But, I'd like the baseline terrain to be generative, based on the GPX data.

I've looked at FT and now I'm eyeballing World Machine.

Anyone have suggestions of other tools or approaches?

Thanks!

Julian Bleecker
www.nearfuturelaboratory.com