Sundayshot - Blog Posts

🗻 Diorama Drama

So, John Nelson made this absolutely simple tutorial on how to create a diorama interesting features on Earth's surfaces. I have been eyeing alot of people making them and resisting the urge to make one. I mean, I have the habit of falling into a rabbit hole with making maps that I'll definitely be having too much fun to stop. That could mean hours and hours scrutinizing colors, perspective or setups and even legend arrangements. But this...I decided not to overdo it and just make one.

I can't believe how easy it is to make one! Here's a piece of many to come; the elevation diorama of area within the Batang Ai Dam and Batang Ai National Park in Sarawak, East Malaysia.

What you'll learn... 1️⃣ How to extract raster from existing image layer in Living Atlas; that's how we extracted the DEM layer for this elevation data.

2️⃣ How to create a 3D scene in ArcGIS Pro and navigate through them.

3️⃣ How to create a layout layer and export them as a static image format i.e jpeg, png, tif etc...

Check out the video tutorial here 👇🏻

I was thinking that this tutorial is making me feel like there is a possibility of creating some floating island or pixel-like models of isolated pieces of land -- my head is imagining some kind of dragons flying around in some nonexistent Viking fantasy map. But hey...if you're not inspired to create crazier maps from John's tutorial, then are you even a cartographer at all?

He's on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and he even has this supercool blog of his; Adventures in Mapping, where he shares all of his tutorials in full documentation and gorgeous portfolio that could only consist of magic! One such as I can only aspire.

So, that was what our Sunday looked like and I think I'll be playing around with dioramas for a few weeks. Let's see just how many of these I can make 'til the next Sunday.