This is a technique I started working on for large maps of small areas. I needed to find new ways to take low resolution data and extrapolate it into a scene that felt real. The learning to even get this technique off the ground took almost a year, but is finally something I'm proud to share.
The big breakthroughs I had were thanks to a series of conversations with folks that know much more than me, and many late nights fighting with blender.
Grand Teton National Park - June 2024
This map was a long and tedious but very fun journey for me.
The first big breakthrough in blender for me came with the discovery of particle systems, and the ability to place vegetation, (evergreens, apsens, and brush) based on three black and white vegetation class images.
The second was a suggestion from Alexander Guthrie, who told me to try modelling my buildings in Sketchup instead of blender.
I spent many hours smoothing terrain and cleaning up raw satellite imagery.
All of the people in this first map were rendered with no color, so their shadows would be accurate. Then they were painted individually in photoshop. The public accent buildings were given a glow and a touch more saturation to help them pop.
Grand Teton National Park - June 2024
My favorite part of this map was painting texture and waves into the water on the Snake River, Jackson Lake, and the dam outflow. I tried to roughly estimate the cfs output of the dam given the date of the imagery I used as the basemap, and actually paint this on the image.
Grand Teton National Park - June 2024
Some of my best friends work at the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center, where they run a program giving wildflower walks.
I wanted to give a small nod to this with some pops of color, in the places where those species of wildflowers occur behind the building, on the way towards the Murie Ranch.
The biggest goal of this map is to highlight the new Moose Landing parking lot, and the places that visitors can explore from here while waiting for float trips to take off. I struggled for awhile on how to best let the restricted government buildings be in the frame for reference but draw as little attention as possible. I ended up settling with giving them all a washed out brown/grey color, and as little contrast as I could without losing their defintion.
