NACIS 2019

Drawing Colour Hillshade by Hand
Presenter: Sarah Bell, Esri
At last year's NACIS, I shared some hand-drawn hillshade techniques with graphite during the CartoCamp workshop co-presented with cartographer & artist Molly O'Halloran. Since then, I have been experimenting with some shareable methods for drawing hillshade with coloured pencil. During this talk, I will present practical techniques and tips for drawing your own full-colour shaded relief maps. Using the site of NACIS 2019 as inspiration, you will see the Cascade mountains emerge through these hand-drawn colour hillshade techniques as I describe the steps performed to make these maps' colourful terrain.

Designing the Equal Earth Physical Map
Presenter: Tom Patterson, NPS (retired)
The Equal Earth Physical Map is a follow-up to the Equal Earth Political Map introduced last year at NACIS. The new map focuses entirely on the natural world – terrain, rivers and lakes, vegetation, land cover, and the ocean floor – free of obscuring country boundaries. With step-by-step slides, I will discuss the design considerations that went into building it, starting with raster base art, moving on to line work, and ending with place names. The map features stylized shaded relief processed with a new technology – artificial neural networks – obtained from a surprising source. Find out from where.

Texture Shading Software in Python
Presenter: Leland Brown
Introducing a more user-friendly interface for rendering terrain representations using the "texture shading" algorithm. Written purely in Python and relying on a minimum of additional Python libraries (scipy, gdal, PIL), the software is free and easy to set up whether you're using Mac, Windows, or Linux. Use it as a standalone graphical tool, call the algorithm from a Python script, or incorporate the open-source code into your own programs. Adjust rendering parameters dynamically and see the effects on the image in real-time, so as to optimize the look of your maps.

Symbol Masking in ArcGIS Pro
Presenter: Craig Williams, Esri
Say no to the maligned halo and use masking, halo's sophisticated cousin. Sometimes known as clipping paths or knockouts, masks can provide clarity to dense maps where multiple graphics intersect. ArcGIS Pro has several options for masking creation and new configuration options to improve your maps. Learn how to create masks for text and other symbols and use symbol layer masking to produce clean maps where graphics overlap. You'll also see how to supercharge your map creation with mask editing and workflow automation.

Beyond Hillshading in Blender- Breaking Cartographic Convention with Care
Presenter: Nick Underwood, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Blender, a free and open source 3D modeling and animation software, is a sandbox for the cartographic imagination. Beloved by artists, game designers, and scientists, Blender has been increasingly adopted by map makers for its hillshading capabilities, popularized by Daniel Huffman's excellent tutorial. In this presentation, I highlight additional ways Blender's versatile toolkit can be used to design maps that surprise and engage, and share my own design thinking on how and when to break cartographic convention.

Bringing Google Earth Engine into Cartographic Workflows
Presenter: Jeff Howarth, Middlebury College
Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud-based platform for accessing and processing satellite imagery and geospatial datasets. GEE includes an online Integrated Development Environment that uses a Javascript API. This talk presents introductory procedures for using the GEE platform in cartographic workflows that can be integrated with other GIS and graphics software. I demonstrate simple procedures for gathering and filtering datasets, processing topographic, categorical, and spectral attributes, and exporting data. To illustrate these procedures, I show examples for making a shaded relief map, creating hypsometric and landcover tints, and working with natural and false color imagery.