Experiments

Part of the fun of being a mapmaker nowadays is the availablity of all sorts of interesting software, data and methods to explore.

QTVR 360° Panoramas

Aspen, Colorado (440k)
Genesee, Colorado (436k)

QuickTime panoramas made with Natural Scene Designer.

You will need the Quicktime player installed on your computer.

Central Wasach Mountains, Utah (167k)

This started out as a job for a phonebook, but the colors in the map printed poorly on the thin newsprint (telco paper). That terrain image was continued in greyscale for the phone book. Here is the original color version of the terrain only. Notice the lit slopes have a tinge of yellow, and the shadow slopes have a blueish cast.

Valle Grande, New Mexico (80 k) Huge version (1.2 m)

Valle Grande is a beautiful, vast ancient caldera northwest of Los Alamos. I scanned USGS topo maps into Photoshop, and airbrushed in the shading. Photoshop’s airbrush certainly is an improvement over the real thing (blasphemy!)

Planet (75 k)

Imaginary planet created with a Photoshop plug-in called LunarCell.

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Anaglyph of Grand Canyon, Arizona (155 k)

Made with Bryce and StereoPress (Mac)

OK, so you're going to need to get a pair of those red-blue glasses to view this.

Stereograms

Grand Canyon, Arizona (259 k)
Finger Lakes, New York (104 k)

Either relax your eyes (parallel) or cross your eyes to see these stereo images. It will be helpful to sit a bit further away from your screen.

The first is a stereogram shaded relief of Grand Canyon, Arizona made in Bryce and Photoshop.

Next is a stereo road map of Finger Lakes area in Upstate New York made in FreeHand (parallel eyes only). Certain elements were shifted manually on each side to acheive the stereo effect.

Clinton, Iowa Flyby (really huge: 17m)

A crude but interesting flyby of a draped map over DEM terrain in Bryce. The flight path follows the Mississippi River northward past Clinton, Iowa. Generally jerky motion and grainy color-enjoy!