When I'm not creating comic strips and writing Inkscape tutorials I have a day job working for a weather forecasting company. We've recently moved into new offices, and they wanted a weather chart of storm Emma (better known in the UK as 'the beast from the East') to cover one wall of the new boardroom.
The only problem is that the wall is a massive 9m x 3.5m!!!
They wanted to use an 'orography' layer in the chart - a background that represents the texture of the land to give the sort of 3d look you might see in an atlas. Unfortunately the only orography source available was intended for use on web sites, and was far too low res look okay when blown up to such a size. So I took that greyscale orography image, gave it a false colour map in The GIMP, then used an online halftone tool (commercial, but fairly cheap) to produce an SVG file containing over 210,000 circles representing the colours in the orography layer. (I didn't use Inkscape's Tiled Clones dialog for this, as it struggles well before reaching that number of objects).
Then I had to add the meteorological layer back in, and tweak it all to give rounded linecaps and proper joins in paths that needed them. From Inkscape I exported PDF which was printed on vinyl and mounted by a specialist company, to give this result:
Here's a close up to show the detail of the 210k dots:
As expected, Inkscape was sloooow working on this. Loading the dots layer took 20mins. Any button press or click of the mouse took between 2 and 5 minutes to respond - and a 'select all' on the dots was another 20mins. But to my delight the software managed the task: it crashed twice (both when trying to undo), but it was able to auto-save the file, and I made plenty of backups as I went along.
Fascinating work! This would be a wonderful example to give to students (or people who like to code) as an optimization project. I actually think that the use of "dots" is a clever and asthetically pleasing result. Thanks for sharing this. I'd be interested to know if you've managed to come across any better vector based maps to use as your starting point for the weather overlay? Certainly there must be government web sites that operate the weather satellites that have such templates, or open source mapping repositories that generate a vector based output. I'd keep looking around - that would save you considerable time. =)
Getting vector maps isn't a problem - in fact I had to use a vector of the country outlines in order to separate the low-lying land from the sea in the orography image. Had I just wanted plain green dots (or a green fill) for the land, that would have been a lot simpler. But the bosses wanted to use orography, for which I've not found any good vector images. The nature of an orography image lends itself better to bitmaps than vector, and nobody else is stupid enough to be trying to blow it up to this sort of size.
By way of an example, here's a section of the orography image I had to work with.
As you can see it's more of a texture layer than something suited to vectors. The country outlines, borders, waterways and meteorological content are usually overlaid onto this, in which case they may well be vectors - as was the case for the meteorological content used in the final wall print.
The meteorological layers came from a program whose sole purpose in life is to produce weather maps. Because of the many different projections, scales and regions used in mapping, even if I had been able to find a good vector orography image the likelihood of it matching the output of that software is slim.
So nice~ The circles give an aesthetic pleasing result; I would watch the wall all day rather than working! but-- BUT
The nature of an orography image lends itself better to bitmaps than vector, and nobody else is stupid enough to be trying to blow it up to this sort of size.
Is this a challenge?? It seems the type of thing I like to do: boring but useful. 😆
Anyway..did you made more for your job with Inkscape? *curious*
The nature of an orography image lends itself better to bitmaps than vector, and nobody else is stupid enough to be trying to blow it up to this sort of size.
Probably I'd tried using a halftoning effect but that wouldn't come close in such clean samples.
With the repeating part covered in the same colour maybe a pattern fill can free up alot of space. But then again, how would one transform the outlines of those filled objects to match the hexagonal grid?
My error: I had thought that the orographic information was made of complete "closed" shapes that varied by elevation. Now that I see what you ended up working with, your method seems like the only way. In any event - still an impressive solution and outcome ... like Roberto said: I'd probably spend more time looking at the wall than paying attention to the meeting! =)
(Could a contour map with interpolated prominence from LiDAR data mimic the elevation in bounded areas to determine the dot/circle shading in furutre versions?)
(Could a contour map with interpolated prominence from LiDAR data mimic the elevation in bounded areas to determine the dot/circle shading in furutre versions?)
I would have liked to work from an elevation map rather than orography, but I didn't get any choice in the source image - it was generated by one of the company directors who is responsible for producing all our maps, and nobody was going to argue with him on this one.
Anyway..did you made more for your job with Inkscape? *curious*
My day job there is as a web developer, but the maps we use on the website are all PNGs (or JPEGs for satellite imagery), so the only use for Inkscape is the occasional icon or modification to the company logo.
That looks different from the kind of weather maps we see on tv here. What part of the hurricane is the map depicting? Or....it's showing more than just the hurricane, isn't it?
Maybe -- I recognize the warm and cold front lines - maybe. But not sure. Is that a smaller storm coming in before and after the hurricane? Or is it all part of the hurricane?
It's just a storm - we don't really get hurricane weather over here, so "the beast from the East" that caused mayhem in the UK would probably pass as "a little overcast" in some other parts of the world. The eye of the storm is the low pressure area, marked with an "L", just next to the word "Emma". Apart from the weather fronts, all it's showing are isobars - contour lines of equal pressure - and my false orography converted into circles as an 'artistic' approach to depicting the land masses.
It's just a storm - we don't really get hurricane weather over here
Oh, I thought it was a hurricane because of the name. There's an international system for naming hurricanes, I think (or "cyclones" as they are called in some places).
Do you have a system for deciding when a storm is bad enough to get a name? Or is it just kind of public sentiment?
Oh hey! Some of us have been talking, off and on, about a new feature for the website, where Inkscape users can do a little writeup about a project where they used Inkscape. I don't know where that feature stands right now, but I don't think it would take much time. Maybe Maren will comment?
To be honest I don't know a lot about the meteorological side of things, let along the criteria for naming storms. I know the names ascend through the alphabet, alternating between "male" and "female" names - as is also the case with hurricanes - but that's the extent of my knowledge. I didn't even know "the beast from the East" was officially named Emma until I took on this project.
As for a more detailed write-up, I'm going to see if the Linux magazine that my cartoon strip appears in would be interested in commisioning an article about it: may as well make a little extra money on the back of this work, if I can ;)
Great work on that wall, it looks artful and educational at the same time! About the naming of storm systems, this is actually a hot topic in western europe. we had a few big storms this winter, crossing country lines as storms naturally do, but the different countries have different systems for naming them, so a storm that arrives in Spain will get named there first, if it crosses into France or Germany it will be reported under a different name, etc. So now they're talking about streamlining this system a bit, f.e. by allowing the country where the storm landed to name it and then keeping that name as it moves through Europe. Alternative is to set up a EU system.
Share Finished Artwork A beast of an Inkscape project
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When I'm not creating comic strips and writing Inkscape tutorials I have a day job working for a weather forecasting company. We've recently moved into new offices, and they wanted a weather chart of storm Emma (better known in the UK as 'the beast from the East') to cover one wall of the new boardroom.
The only problem is that the wall is a massive 9m x 3.5m!!!
They wanted to use an 'orography' layer in the chart - a background that represents the texture of the land to give the sort of 3d look you might see in an atlas. Unfortunately the only orography source available was intended for use on web sites, and was far too low res look okay when blown up to such a size. So I took that greyscale orography image, gave it a false colour map in The GIMP, then used an online halftone tool (commercial, but fairly cheap) to produce an SVG file containing over 210,000 circles representing the colours in the orography layer. (I didn't use Inkscape's Tiled Clones dialog for this, as it struggles well before reaching that number of objects).
Then I had to add the meteorological layer back in, and tweak it all to give rounded linecaps and proper joins in paths that needed them. From Inkscape I exported PDF which was printed on vinyl and mounted by a specialist company, to give this result:
Here's a close up to show the detail of the 210k dots:
As expected, Inkscape was sloooow working on this. Loading the dots layer took 20mins. Any button press or click of the mouse took between 2 and 5 minutes to respond - and a 'select all' on the dots was another 20mins. But to my delight the software managed the task: it crashed twice (both when trying to undo), but it was able to auto-save the file, and I made plenty of backups as I went along.
Fascinating work! This would be a wonderful example to give to students (or people who like to code) as an optimization project. I actually think that the use of "dots" is a clever and asthetically pleasing result. Thanks for sharing this. I'd be interested to know if you've managed to come across any better vector based maps to use as your starting point for the weather overlay? Certainly there must be government web sites that operate the weather satellites that have such templates, or open source mapping repositories that generate a vector based output. I'd keep looking around - that would save you considerable time. =)
Getting vector maps isn't a problem - in fact I had to use a vector of the country outlines in order to separate the low-lying land from the sea in the orography image. Had I just wanted plain green dots (or a green fill) for the land, that would have been a lot simpler. But the bosses wanted to use orography, for which I've not found any good vector images. The nature of an orography image lends itself better to bitmaps than vector, and nobody else is stupid enough to be trying to blow it up to this sort of size.
By way of an example, here's a section of the orography image I had to work with.
As you can see it's more of a texture layer than something suited to vectors. The country outlines, borders, waterways and meteorological content are usually overlaid onto this, in which case they may well be vectors - as was the case for the meteorological content used in the final wall print.
The meteorological layers came from a program whose sole purpose in life is to produce weather maps. Because of the many different projections, scales and regions used in mapping, even if I had been able to find a good vector orography image the likelihood of it matching the output of that software is slim.
So nice~ The circles give an aesthetic pleasing result; I would watch the wall all day rather than working! but-- BUT
Is this a challenge?? It seems the type of thing I like to do: boring but useful. 😆
Anyway..did you made more for your job with Inkscape? *curious*
Looks impressive!
Probably I'd tried using a halftoning effect but that wouldn't come close in such clean samples.
With the repeating part covered in the same colour maybe a pattern fill can free up alot of space. But then again, how would one transform the outlines of those filled objects to match the hexagonal grid?
My error: I had thought that the orographic information was made of complete "closed" shapes that varied by elevation. Now that I see what you ended up working with, your method seems like the only way. In any event - still an impressive solution and outcome ... like Roberto said: I'd probably spend more time looking at the wall than paying attention to the meeting! =)
(Could a contour map with interpolated prominence from LiDAR data mimic the elevation in bounded areas to determine the dot/circle shading in furutre versions?)
I would have liked to work from an elevation map rather than orography, but I didn't get any choice in the source image - it was generated by one of the company directors who is responsible for producing all our maps, and nobody was going to argue with him on this one.
My day job there is as a web developer, but the maps we use on the website are all PNGs (or JPEGs for satellite imagery), so the only use for Inkscape is the occasional icon or modification to the company logo.
Very impressive!
That looks different from the kind of weather maps we see on tv here. What part of the hurricane is the map depicting? Or....it's showing more than just the hurricane, isn't it?
Maybe -- I recognize the warm and cold front lines - maybe. But not sure. Is that a smaller storm coming in before and after the hurricane? Or is it all part of the hurricane?
It's just a storm - we don't really get hurricane weather over here, so "the beast from the East" that caused mayhem in the UK would probably pass as "a little overcast" in some other parts of the world. The eye of the storm is the low pressure area, marked with an "L", just next to the word "Emma". Apart from the weather fronts, all it's showing are isobars - contour lines of equal pressure - and my false orography converted into circles as an 'artistic' approach to depicting the land masses.
What a great outcome. It looks great.
Ignore... Sorry. Double posted, no way to remove.
Oh, I thought it was a hurricane because of the name. There's an international system for naming hurricanes, I think (or "cyclones" as they are called in some places).
Do you have a system for deciding when a storm is bad enough to get a name? Or is it just kind of public sentiment?
Oh hey! Some of us have been talking, off and on, about a new feature for the website, where Inkscape users can do a little writeup about a project where they used Inkscape. I don't know where that feature stands right now, but I don't think it would take much time. Maybe Maren will comment?
To be honest I don't know a lot about the meteorological side of things, let along the criteria for naming storms. I know the names ascend through the alphabet, alternating between "male" and "female" names - as is also the case with hurricanes - but that's the extent of my knowledge. I didn't even know "the beast from the East" was officially named Emma until I took on this project.
As for a more detailed write-up, I'm going to see if the Linux magazine that my cartoon strip appears in would be interested in commisioning an article about it: may as well make a little extra money on the back of this work, if I can ;)
wow
Great work on that wall, it looks artful and educational at the same time! About the naming of storm systems, this is actually a hot topic in western europe. we had a few big storms this winter, crossing country lines as storms naturally do, but the different countries have different systems for naming them, so a storm that arrives in Spain will get named there first, if it crosses into France or Germany it will be reported under a different name, etc. So now they're talking about streamlining this system a bit, f.e. by allowing the country where the storm landed to name it and then keeping that name as it moves through Europe. Alternative is to set up a EU system.