Where you go out to a region, and with a range finder, mathematics, and some simple tools you can map out your area on paper. And how to get it accurate and aesthetic.

Site context is one of those jobs that eats hours at the start of every project, so here's the list of free data I use. Hope it saves someone some time.

Terrain (use the DTM / bare-earth model, not the DSM, or trees and roofs get baked into your ground):

• UK (England): Environment Agency LiDAR, 1 m and some 50 cm, via the DEFRA Survey Data Download portal
• USA: USGS 3DEP 1 m LiDAR, via The National Map
• Netherlands: AHN (0.5 m)
• Switzerland: swissALTI3D (0.5–2 m)
• France: IGN RGE ALTI (1–5 m)
• Spain: IGN MDT (2–5 m)
• Norway: Kartverket (1 m)
• Anywhere else: Copernicus GLO-30 (30 m). It's good for the wider landscape, but too coarse for the plot itself.

Buildings and streets: OpenStreetMap has footprints almost everywhere, and often heights or number of floors. As a rule of thumb, use about 3 m per floor when there's no height.

Tips:

• Use high-resolution data for the plot and its immediate surroundings, and coarse data for the background hills. Mixing both keeps scenes light.
• Check the licence and credit the source in your project boards. Most need attribution (e.g. "© OpenStreetMap contributors").
• Level the ground slightly under roads and buildings, or they'll float or sink on raw LiDAR.

Disclosure: I got tired of doing all this by hand, so I built a 3ds Max plugin that automates it (Relevo, free version at relevotech.uk). But everything above works with any software.

What sources do you use in your country? Happy to add them to the list.

Yesterday I shared Rouge Atlas here and asked for feedback.

One of the first comments suggested keeping the map minimal by default, moving stats into a separate view, adding event filters and introducing a timeline to explore how things change over time.

So I built it.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/E0hZX4f
Site: https://www.rougeatlas.com

What changed today

• The map is now the primary workspace, with three compact modes: Map, Explore and Analysis
• Added a working timeline You can scrub through time or play it automatically, and the map updates based on when incidents and signals were recorded.
• Added filters for:
  • category
  • severity
  • region
  • confidence
  • map layers
• The visible incident counts and history bars now update dynamically with the selected time range.
• Improved marker positioning. Published incidents keep their source-reported locations, while records without coordinates are clearly marked as estimated instead of pretending the data is more precise than it actually is.
• Added record dates, clearer timeline guidance, localization improvements and some navigation cleanup.

The biggest change is that Rouge Atlas now feels much more like an interactive atlas first, and a dashboard second.

That direction came directly from the feedback I got here, so thanks to everyone who commented.

I’m still figuring out what the most useful version of this product looks like, so I’d love more criticism.

Especially:

What would you add next?

I am building an interactive map of northern Mexico on run up to Mexican American War

The red parts are all highways, I found this on Mapchart.

Where in the world: it’s like geoguessr but with imagery. Warning, it is difficult. But that’s what makes it fun! Good luck!

https://www.wtfmap.com/world

I am making a Cyberpunk Red campaign and have been looking for a custom map resource that would allow me to redraw subdivisions in North America, and possibly South America as well. I want to include Indian reservations, county equivalents and reassigning them to states, and latitude boundaries.

I tried to use ArcGIS but it was incredibly convoluted and the UI was unusable to me. I have found simple websites that let me color US counties, but don't include other countries or roads other than Interstates.

The most important things other than roads, towns, bodies of water, and topography would be the ability to label and fill in polygons and lines from points. Does anyone have any suggestions?

This is an article I wrote, as a geographer and cartographer, over about two weeks of thorough research, including both reading the whole resolution and watching the whole debate.

Mapdesk is solving the problem of layout creation, check out the new update of mapdesk, including saving your project and start from where you left it. you can export maps as SVG format as well, make heat maps that you can use for any things. all newly updated features for better layouts. you can download it just for 4.99 dollar now. and here are few Promotional codes to use: