Procedural mapping style experiments

[su_liam]

For the faded look, you might add a white layer below your artwork and then reduce the opacity of your artwork till it looks properly faded. That's in photoshop, you should be able to do something similar in illustrator. I'd check, but I'm booted up in windows ("This is your brain. This is your brain on windows.") and all my adobe apps are on mac.

I have an idea and a couple tuts for distressed text. My idea is to duplicate your text layer, rasterize it and apply Filter>Brush Strokes>Spatter. I'd suggest a very light, blurred spatter. Because the prototype seems fairly hard-edged, just messy, I'd probably apply a threshold to the result.

In other news, tutorials:
For Photoshop
A nice video for Frustrator
A texty tut for 'strator

[gilgamec]

I'm not sure why its so difficult to reproduce the colours...wouldn't a straight colour picker (say 3X3 average) in photoshop do it?

I tried it, but was only moderately successful. (There's also colour issues with the conversion from PDF to PNG, for some reason.)

To get the bleed on the lettering it might with worth trying an outer glow layer style using black / multiply / low opacity....might help?

My idea is to duplicate your text layer, rasterize it and apply Filter>Brush Strokes>Spatter. I'd suggest a very light, blurred spatter. Because the prototype seems fairly hard-edged, just messy, I'd probably apply a threshold to the result.

Both of these are probably good ideas, but I'm using neither Photoshop nor Illustrator; this is is all done procedurally in Asymptote. I'm using Illustrator for rasterization of the PDF (because it's the best tool I've found for the task; some of my experiments are in an earlier thread), but nothing else.
Really, I'm quite pleased with the results; the distressed and fuzzy text is a slight issue, but given the size of the original (Jamaica is only about an inch and a half long in the atlas), it's probably neither surprising nor a big problem.

[gilgamec]

Another day, another mapping style.

This one's from my "Reader's Digest Great World Atlas", from about 1960.

The coastline I used on the last map is too low-res, so I had to find a higher-detail one:

We add in rivers from the same database as earlier. There's again a missing river:

Cities:

[gilgamec]

The map has both roads and railroads. (Aha! That was one of the problems with the previous map -- obviously, a map from 1914 would show railroads, not highways!) The railroad database doesn't give us as complete a network as on the old map, so I had to add in a few lines.)

Now roads, from the same database as the last map:

Labels:

[gilgamec]

A new feature of this map is that it shows altitudes. The levels are at 6000, 600, 150 feet below sea level, and 600, 1500, 6000 feet above sea level. I grabbed a 1km resolution elevation grid and ran a contour finder, giving me these:

They're much higher-frequency than (and quite different from) the ones on the old map. (Ah, well, they didn't have satellite radar topography back then.) The complexity looks like it might be too much, but let's put in the fill patterns:

Comparing to the original:


They compare quite well, I think, with some problems which I'll look at in the next post.

[gilgamec]

In the last post I mentioned that there are some issues with the recreation. (Undoubtedly there's lots, but these are the two I'm most irritated with.)

First, there's a problem with the hatching in the sea area. Take a look at these two details from the maps:

The thing I notice about the original map is that the lines seem to fit nicely together; there's no partial lines, and what lines are there seem to meet up nicely at the corners. This is not at all what the lines in my recreation do, and I'm not certain I know how to get that effect procedurally (or, indeed, manually, at least not without an enormous amount of work).

The second problem is probably much more solvable. Again, look at these two details, of low-altitude land:

They both consist of blue stripes overlaid by yellow ones, but thanks to the magic of subtractive colours, the original map gives us a green! I'm still working on using CMYK to get this effect, but it's not going as well as I'd like; adding the "spot blue" (from the seas) and the "spot yellow" (from the mountains) doesn't give me the green effect I'd like. Work is ongoing to get the lowlands to look right.

[Ascension]

The lines not meeting up looks like the problem is that they are different. Your vert lines are evenly spaced but your horiz lines have a wide white and thin teal. For the yellow thing, those may have to be on a new layer set to overlay.

[Hai-Etlik]

Your problem with the green caught my attention as something SVG filter effects could deal with. I know you are using Asymptote, not SVG, but I decided to try anyway.

   <filter
       inkscape:collect="always"
       id="filter5355"
       width="1.3999999999999999"
       height="1.3999999999999999"
       x="-0.20000000000000001"
       y="-0.20000000000000001">
      <feTurbulence
         id="feTurbulence5365"
         result="result2"
         baseFrequency="0.25"
         type="fractalNoise"
         numOctaves="4" />
      <feFlood
         id="feFlood5394"
         flood-color="rgb(255,255,255)"
         result="result3"
         in="SourceGraphic" />
      <feDisplacementMap
         id="feDisplacementMap5363"
         in2="result2"
         in="SourceGraphic"
         scale="4"
         yChannelSelector="G" />
      <feGaussianBlur
         stdDeviation="0.80000000000000004"
         id="feGaussianBlur5367"
         result="result5" />
      <feColorMatrix
         id="feColorMatrix5533"
         in="result2"
         result="result6"
         type="matrix"
         values="1 0 0 0 0.5 0 0.5 0 0 0.5 0 0 0.5 0 0 0 0 0 0.6 0 " />
      <feComposite
         id="feComposite5392"
         operator="out"
         in2="result6"
         in="result5"
         result="result7" />
      <feMerge
         id="feMerge5541">
        <feMergeNode
           inkscape:collect="always"
           id="feMergeNode5545"
           in="result3" />
        <feMergeNode
           inkscape:collect="always"
           id="feMergeNode5547"
           in="result7" />
      </feMerge>
      <feBlend
         inkscape:collect="always"
         mode="multiply"
         in2="BackgroundImage"
         id="feBlend5357"
         result="result1" />
    </filter>

[guyanonymous]

OK..I'm loving where this process is taking you - and intrigued by the above svg experiment. Looking good!

[gilgamec]

Hmmm.... I was going to post a bunch of experiments I did, trying to find the "correct" colours which combine to give the right green impression ... then I actually tried it with the colours I used in the actual map, and got about the right shade of green! (Apparently, I've been looking at the combinations too close-up.)

This is done purely by setting the "yellow" color to 50% opacity.

Your problem with the green caught my attention as something SVG filter effects could deal with.

This is neat! I'm most interested in how you captured the minor noise-like effects of the paper grain; that's something I hadn't even considered, and yet my brief experiments in that direction do increase verisimilitude. Thanks!

However, this (and the yellow+blue=green thing, too) does bring up a concern I have: how much should I worry about printing artifacts, or printing processes, in these recreations? The next recreation I'm working on has halftoning, and there's no way I'm going there; I'll just stick to smooth shading of solid colours. But in the 1914 map, I included the waviness of the hatching, and it improved the feel of the map quite a bit. Should I do all of this in a more "simulationist" mode, making all of my colours partly transparent and having the final effect equivalent to inks on paper?

How far do you go in emulating a map style?