Latest Contributions by RalucaNicola1

In this blog post I want to show you how you can steal some of John Nelson's watercolor styles and use them on an interactive web globe. I used this style to depict happy moments collected for a research about happiness. You can check out the application here: What makes us happy? For the countries I used Dylan Moriarty's hand drawn style of country boundaries from Project Linework. I applied John's styles on the country polygons (orange for countries that have happy moments and gray for the ones that don't). Publishing them as a feature layer or a vector tile layer will not work because the symbols use multiple picture fill symbol layers which are not supported on the web or as vector tile styles. So I published them as a tile layer, you can find it here.  For the graticule I used John Nelson's Firefly grid data (Oceans 5 degrees). And for the ocean, I created a rectangular polygon with the extent of the whole world and then I applied the Pairwise erase tool in the Analysis toolbox. Finally I applied John's Pacific Blue symbol. The final globe looks like this and you can interact with it here.  Hope that this inspired you for some painted mapping projects, Raluca ... View more

I was recently investigating how to show a winter landscape in a 3D interactive web scene. I had a lot of inspiration from John Nelson's blog post and video on this topic, James Niehue's beautiful paintings of winter landscapes and, of course, nature itself:   My goal with this project was to create a basemap that sends across that feeling of winter. We don't want it to be realistic, but also not too artistic because the basemap shouldn't steal the show. On top of it we might want to add data for a snowshoe hike, or a ski resort. So here's what I came up with: A video of the basemap. You can see the basemap in the web application here.    All right, if I've sparked your curiosity, let's see if I can get your attention: how can we create the basemap? Short disclaimer at this point: we can't create it in ArcGIS SceneViewer (yet), it uses a custom layer that can only be created with ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript.  In my experiments I played with a combination of white for the sun-lit areas and blue-purple for the areas in the shade. To achieve this effect, we can use an ImageryTileLayer with elevation data with a RasterStretchRenderer that goes from blue to white (see code on GitHub). Next we want the terrain shading to have a purple hue. So we'll use the world terrain shading layer, load it in a BaseTileLayer and apply CSS filters on the tiles before they are drawn. We will rotate the hue by 190 degrees, to have a purple tone instead of the beige-gray color. We'll also apply saturation, to make it stand out more (see code on GitHub).  Optionally, we can generate a layer of trees for the displayed area and add 3D buildings (available from Swisstopo). Click here to try out the live application: Winter landscape. Clone the GitHub repo and modify it to add your own data on top of it.. or just enable the snowy weather and the music and enjoy the virtual winter 🙂 In any case, I'd love to know how you used it.   Happy mapping, Raluca ... View more