A couple of weeks ago I posted some images from a new map I’d been working on. The motivation behind this was mostly curiosity, though I’ve been dabbling with trying to do things like this in python for a while, before realising that implementing hill-shading was probably more effort than it was worth, and turning to a tool actually designed for this: QGIS.
It turned out learning how to use enough of QGIS to get what I wanted wasn’t all that hard. But of course, that’s where things spiralled, so now I have a complete basemap of Scottish terrain in the new style, which you can browse here. One day I’ll learn to keep projects simple.
I don’t have a nice straight-forward way of updating this (yet) as the whole process felt very manual, so I guess my next job will be trying to make a nice Makefile which will allow the basemap to be regenerated any time I want to update it. So keep an eye out for a new repository at some point, I suppose!
The data about hills is derived from The Database of British and Irish Hills which is happily available under a creative commons license. The underlying terrain data came from the Space Shuttle Radar Mission, SRTM, while bodies of water and forests are derived from OpenStreetMap data.