My sea rise maps were a perfect starting point for a broader interest in speculative cartography.
I love taking bits of the real world and morphing them into something else. There are some fascinating landforms in the world, and they can be the perfect starting points in the creation of fictional places.
Earlier this year, I was approached by AlexMcDowell, who teaches a class on world building at USC. He had seen my sea level rise maps, and was interested in having me lecture his class on cartography in the larger context of fictional world building. I was thrilled to be asked, and started putting together a presentation of my work and the potential to create new worlds out of existing places.
I wanted to include a demonstration of my existing work, and also to give a quick overview of combining different geographies to create something new. I had used this technique in a project for a game studio recently.
To make this fantasy map, I started by looking to the real world for inspiration. The data to model existing landforms is easy to find, and of increasingly high resolution. There are fascinating landscapes out there, and many of them have had LiDAR scans taken, which can be extremely precise.
For this demonstration project, I started with a LiDAR-derived digital elevation model of Meteor Crater, in northern Arizona. Meteor Crater is literally a crater created about 50,000 years ago by a meteorite impact, leaving a crater 500 feet deep, and about 3/4 of a mile across.
I sourced the terrain data from Open Topography. The image below shows a heightmap derived from this data, low elevations showing a darker tone, and higher elevations with a lighter tone.
I wanted to see what a real-world map would look like, so I made a preliminary map of just the crater. I used QGIS to create elevation colors, Blender to create the hillshading, then assembled it all in Photoshop.
From here, I wanted to combine it with a completely different landscape–the Los Angeles Basin.
I didn’t want to just plop things into the landscape. I needed a guiding concept in my terrain editing. It didn’t need to be much, just something that would inform what I would be adding and modifying in the landscape. I wanted to use Meteor Crater as the starting point….so what is the concept beyond a crater?
My quick concept was that, instead of impacting in a high, dry, desert plateau, the meteor hit modern Los Angeles. This would be easily accessible and, ahem, impactful to the USC students.
The heightmaps, below, are used to generate terrain.
I took the work I’d done a couple of years ago for the Retrofuture series in LA. I’d modeled the terrain in GIS and in Blender, so it was an easy step to combine the two different terrains.
Along with the the heightmaps, I grabbed aerials of each area, aligned with each heightmap.
I brought the heightmaps and the aerials into Blender, and combined them to create a 3d model of Los Angeles with a massive asteroid crater.
And then added sea level rise, because that is what we do here at Conspiracy of Cartographers.
