Lidar mapping?
C.C. Charron
Surveyor
I saw this image online of a Lidar scan in the Amazon, of a lost "city."
I'm thought, I bet campaign cartographer can do this, but my attempts have not planned out yet.
I am wondering if anyone else has attempted such a map, or has suggestions on a annual or style that might be a good starting point.
Comments
You could tackle that in a number of different ways, though most would be diagramatic rather than an accurate pictorial representation.
The easiest would be to edit the image itself in GIMP to desaturate it and remove the white, then import it to CC3 as an image or file (not a symbol or fill) on it's own sheet and add a Blend Mode effect to that sheet set to Multiply. Place that sheet under the SYMBOLS sheet but above any terrain and background sheets and add symbols on top of it. That way, whatever textures you used to depict the ground would be hill shaded by the scan itself. The disadvantages would be that your use of the map would always have to bear in mind the data usage rights of the scan and that the altered scan image would have to be moved around with the map to preserve the link.
Alternatively, you could use several beveled polygon sheets to emulate the relief in the same way that relief is done in styles like SS5, though that might take rather a lot longer.
Or you could do away with the idea of making the map look just like the scan and use a series of ground terrain sheets to draw what I call grass contours. There are at least 3 shades of grass in most styles, and even if there aren't you can use sheet effects to add more shades of grass (or dirt), remembering to use the darkest shades at the lowest elevations and the palest ones at higher elevations.
This is not an exhaustive list of methods.
Hi, @C.C. Charron! That map doesn't happen to be from the book Lost City of the Monkey God, does it? I read that a few years back and it was fascinating - that's the first time I'd heard of LIDAR.
I have not heard of the book, going to check it out. The picture was online with a report about a city found in the Amazon jungle.