topographic maps in minutes what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales where i'm
sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't forget to subscribe and hit that
little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep making if it wasn't obvious this video
is all about topographic maps but more than anything i'm going to show you how to make this
in just about under two minutes so for this example i'm going to be doing a topographic map
of ben mcdewie so ben mcdewie is the second tallest of monroe here in scotland and basically
i'm just finding it on google maps first to just get myself acquainted with the surrounding area
now the key here is this website here contours dot accessmaps.com once you're in there all you have
to do is put in your location so ben mcdewie for me i'm going to go to ben mcadoo in and now this
is the key part for me here so we've got this here so there's the nephew bridge and if we go here we
can see the nephew bridges there so we'll quickly just be able to find it i think ben mcdewie
is this right here so i'm going to just bring that up to the center of the screen bring ben mcdeway
up to the center of the screen and just quickly go here on the top left to edit styles i'm going
to change this to illuminated contour polygons because that really will show off the height
data much better and then we're just going to go back and forth just to
confirm that that there is ben mcdewey so yes so i can see this valley bit here
is the valley bit right here so fantastic so we know where ben mcdew is now so let's go ahead
and now let's zoom in so i can double click to zoom on in or you can press this button
here i'm going to zoom in one more time and every single time it's got to do drawing those contours
so i have a feeling that that's a little bit too close for what i'm wanting so i'm going to go back
one and that there i think is going to be it it does take a little bit of time this
but trust me this is the fastest way that i've found and i've tried
many many websites here for this so once we have that so we know that that there is ben mcdewie
let me just double check that one more time now ben mcdewie is right next door so ben mcdoury is
this hill here so i'm going to bring that onto the center of my screen and now with that done let's
go ahead and turn it back to just contour lines and i'm going to change some of the digits here
some of the units so first of all i want this to be in meters not feet and instead of every
500 meters let's go for every 100 so i put that in and look there's a big change already so 100
just for the sakes of making things a little bit more legible i'm going to make this a dark blue
and then from there here's what i find really interesting so from my video of where i showed you
how to make thick and thin lines from just doing kiss cuts we can now change this to have an index
interval value and let's go for an interval value of 500 i think that's going to be a
pretty decent one so you see here we've got these now thick lines every now and then
so with that done that's really it so now we're just going to go here to download and we're gonna
download an svg so we're gonna hit download and that is now downloaded this view now there is
one thing to keep in mind i've just downloaded this with the roadmaps usually i do it without
so if you don't want the road maps like i don't just up here on the top left you can turn off
the road maps and you can re-download it that way now i'm going to go and pop this in to illustrator
oh i just need to get this to reload there we go i'm going to pop this into illustrator as i'm not
that great in inkscape but for those of you that know inkscape really well this can all be done in
there so here's our download now in illustrator so i'm just going to quickly just copy this over into
the file that i'm wanting to work with so here we go so we can see that it's really nice and big
now the first thing i want to do is just quickly make myself a little circle for
this coaster now i'm making this coaster 100 millimeters by 100 so 10 centimeter
in diameter so here's my 10 centimeter circle i'm just going to quickly change this to some
extreme color fantastic and i'm also just going to bring up the thickness of this a little bit so
that i can really see it so there we have it now i'm going to make sure that we have this
at the front so range bring front and now we're going to grab this
here and we can see that every single one of these is an individual line so what i'm going to do
is i'm going to select the thick line first so this thick line here and i want to select all
the ones that are the same to it of course there aren't that many thick lines so you could just
select this individually so i could say that one there and then there's this one here it's
done in layers so it's not each individual one so it's not that tedious so let's just do that
one more time let's select that and we're going to select the same appearance then i'm grouping these
and i'm doing the same with the other ones so select the same appearance and group those as well
now my dark line already has a color and the thin liners has a color but i'm going to just
change this color so that they're not the same so i'm going to change it to a red for the thin ones
and now i'm going to grab my file here and i'm going to drag it down because we know where ben
mcdewie is which is right there and that's a little large for me so i'm going to go ahead
and just scale this in now of course if you have a consistent stair scale that you would like to keep
with for instance you were making a collection of coasters like this you would have this
right download them all so that they're all scaled consistently to one another
so i think that there is going to be quite nice so that's a decent cutaway of it fantastic
so now what i'm going to do i'm just going to select my font that i have here on the side
just move it out the way for a little bit and i'm going to use my direct selection tool and
i'm just going to select everything that i don't need here so all this on the side
i'm gonna delete that there all this here on the side right to around there i'm deleting all this
right up to about there i'm deleting and all this right to about here so there we go we've already
cleaned up the scene a whole bunch now the way that maps are marked so the peak of a map is
with a little triangle so i'm just going to go ahead and recreate this triangle here so that i
have it as i want it so go like that and i think the way i had this was a width of two
millimeters is the little triangle that i've just created this usually in a map signifies the peak
now i can see here that this triangle is going to be a little bit too big so let's select
all these lines here making sure that we get them all deselect our cut line here and now let's just
go ahead and scale this up to make sure that our triangle will fit nicely we might be losing
a little bit of the resolution that we'd want but i would like to make sure that that's in there so
there we go i think something like actually let's go down here move that a little bit off to the
side somewhere there i think that looks good to me now let's bring this triangle in let's see is
this triangle still too big is just about but i don't want to make that triangle any smaller
so let's go ahead and select all these lines once again making sure that i do select them
all because if i don't select them all we're going to have some problems so uh you know what i'll do
i'm going to select them all like this deselect my outer line here and deselect my triangle and
now let's scale these up just a touch more about there yeah that for that works okay fantastic now
with that done let's replace this triangle in its position and let's go ahead and put the text in
so the text here of ben mcdewie fantastic and we don't need this text anymore now of course
like i said make sure that if you are keeping a consistent scale and doing a collection of
these that you scale these all the same so then all the spacing of these lines will be
the right for you so now let's just delete what is left here and put that text back
yeah something like that i think will look quite nice and now while we're at it let's
select everything here rotate it by 45 degrees to remove these extra lines here on the side
so removing that removing that there removing this here and removing that there
and let's see if there's any loose lines that won't be in the design at all we can also
delete them because they're just not needed because quite frankly they're not going to be kiss
cut so with that they're removed fantastic let's go ahead and now just rotate this so that we have
the quickest engraving possible so that would be like that for me and with that done now let's go
and bring it into our laser cutting app so here we are within our glowforge app of course if you
don't have a glowforge you will be using your own laser operating app so let's go ahead and
just place this where we're going to be using it let's make sure that we focus up while we're at it
and let's go ahead and what we're going to do is do the thin lines first then the thick line
then the engraving so i'm gonna go and set my thin lines to be my three millimeter birch kiss cut my
thick lines it's the same birch case cut except i'm changing this to my maximum offset of six
millimeters and then i'll just be changing this to my birch three millimeter engraving and then
this one's going to be my birch cutting so with that's pretty much in place let's just move this
somewhere like that fantastic that there is the coaster in place of
ben mcdewie let's hit ready and laser cut this design
and it's as easy as that to use contour maps within your own creations of course this is a
very simple application if you want you can create three dimensional maps instead of kiss cutting the
lines by cutting the wood or you can go ahead and create large wall art with it a huge thank
you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it means the world to me to have your support
and if you're enjoying the content that i'm making here and you think i'm worthy of your support
i would love to see you there too don't forget that we now have a discord channel
the link is down in the description as well where i would love to see what you create with this
new knowledge thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue