OWM2 Request: OWM 3D

[nola]

I am not sure if this is a good idea.

I am not a cartographer. I don't do maps for a living, and I use them mainly for playing role-playing games. And at the moment using OWM is nice, simple, fast and easy and the maps I produce look pretty and to my satisfaction to be used in my games. My fear is that 3D mapping (which I assume is similar to actual 3D modelling) would only add - in my eyes at least - unnecessary complexity when creating maps, leading the entire processing to taking far longer than it does now. And I am not for that

I could be totally wrong of course, and it could be easy to use, intuitive and the maps could look bad-ass.

[unklStewy]

I am not sure if this is a good idea.

I am not a cartographer. I don't do maps for a living, and I use them mainly for playing role-playing games. And at the moment using OWM is nice, simple, fast and easy and the maps I produce look pretty and to my satisfaction to be used in my games. My fear is that 3D mapping (which I assume is similar to actual 3D modelling) would only add - in my eyes at least - unnecessary complexity when creating maps, leading the entire processing to taking far longer than it does now. And I am not for that

I could be totally wrong of course, and it could be easy to use, intuitive and the maps could look bad-ass.

@Nola,

I understand your fears on the subject and I would hope that in the event OWM gains 3D or 2.5D features that it would be a toggle option so those who wish to create in 2D can continue to do so without any additional interaction.

-Casey A.

[Kanchou]

We wouldn't do something complicated like 3D modeling, we would cheat to make it simple to use, which is some of the ideas that Anna and Casey were talking about.

But regardless of how it's implemented (and if) it would be something that you'll have to enable addition options/"dig" to be able to access. It wouldn't be something cluttering the existing interface and options.

- Alejandro

[unklStewy]

Good Deal!

These TMS folks sure are easy to work with ..

Casey

[Big Mac]

2.5D stuff sounds great.

What I really need is for maps to look awesome. So if OWM can use magic to give me something that looks like I spent 4 months tinkering in World Machine, then I'd be happy to be able to do that by cheating and only spending half an hour adjusting a 2D map.

I think that, if there was any sort of 2.5D/3D mode people would need to be able to toggle it off to generate older looking flat maps.

But being able to have some sort of things like contour lines and being able to do things like set the treeline, and have bare rock above, might make it possible for someone to avoid schoolboy errors without needing to spend a ton of time reading how geology works.

Thanks for listening to me. (And I'm not expecting anything for now, except this being on the wishlist for the future.)

[unklStewy]

Something that might be a work around for Mac is the idea of a Lithophane style 3D object.

The idea that you take a 2D rendering and then map it into a 3D environment based on gradient color space. A common method would be to make Darker colors the higher points and the brighter colors the darker points. With html neutrals you could easily have 100 levels of gradient slopes. Start with a specified altitude represented by black and then divide that into equal slices. IF you want a 10m high ridge : 10/100 = .01 dividend per color code... You could even map these gradient points to the pressure applied to a Wacom drawing tab .. or similar.

After generating the terrain map you could then layer the OWM color 2d map on top and stretch to fit .. I don't know ..

Just musing ..

-Casey

[MBFoldmeres]

Hi Guys:)

I'm just freshly bought myself in the beta, but I was watching the development, and now, I have time to read through the forum.
For the record, I'm a Land Surveyor Engineer, and Laser Scanner Operator. I working with 3D models and 3D city databases all day long at the office, so I know quite much about the GIS and carto bacground of these questions.
For the first idea, I think about that, 3D would be nice for OWM. Now, I read the thread, and now, I think, 3D would kill OWM. I see the potential for GIS use of OWM, but the 3D is a hard nut to crack.
During the reading of the previous topics, I see that, ppl love to make maps, for fun, for a journey, for D&D, and so on, and OWM is perfect for this.
3D could be fun, but not in this software. In my point of view, another software with a different name and different goal to achive can do more, than expand OWM with 3D functionality.
2,5D would be interesting. For first idea, I think about fixed viewpoints to make maps a little more realistic, but I don't know much about this.
But, I had another idea about this. As far as I checked the software, there is no contour line drawing. The contours and/or shadows can make a map more realistic. The other way, which would be nice for OWM height display, is one very old way from the old Hungarian maps, where height was displayed by small lines, where line weight and direction could display the mountains. See on the picture below.

OWM is a good map drawing application, but as I wrote before, it's simple, and this is good. I prefer for a software to handle multiple file formats, have a lot of functions, but in OWM, I do not require these. For the success, I think, small improvements and stable operation is much more important, than great upgrades. I saw some GIS softwere, where greater updates were much more important, the solve smaller bugs. OWM can run a great success, when reach official release, but overall, 3D is not suitable for it, according my opinion.
Please don't forget, this is MY point of view:)