RRC Archives

It would be great if the routes or at anchors were also marked on the wall.

Michelle, you're helping a map ignoramus like me with this new concept!

Anyway, Dhoyne covered what I would recommend (arrows to parking and hotspots). It would definitely be great to hover a mouse over the route and see the info. However, if that is too time consuming for you, this is already quite a deal for us.

glasses are on wes......I just always thought roadside was a slab.

pigsteak wrote:glasses are on wes......I just always thought roadside was a slab.

Is that why I often see your car parked there, Pig?

looks awesome michelle!

i know sketchup has a lot of limitations, especially when considering spatial aspects (eg: can't bring in gps locations.. not directly at least) and you can't add things like points. so i took a stab at it using esri stuff.. mainly arcscene. you can come with something that looks alright but it would take some time for sure. the ncie thing would be that you could draw the lines directly on the face (i think sketchup can do that, though) and you can create different face aspects.. again, might be able to do that just as well. you could, though, bring in the gps and such, as well as aerial imagery. that wouldn't be big thing, though, since the imagery is at too low a resolution to be very useful.. (i posted a quick example in the album.. not sure how to shadow stuff just yet. not going to try anyway, though)

long story: i think you're good how you are. sketchup looks ten times better than esri stuff. so you can't have imagery or gps.. big deal. you can get them round-about if you can publish to google earth anyway.

things i'd add to the graphic: draw the route on the face; north arrow; arrow do the trail describing where you came from (for instance: "<-- To KY11"); unless it's major, i wouldn't worry about the streams/waterfalls/boulders.. keep only the pertinent stuff described in the directions.

again, nice stuff. that's going to look great and we need to get some time to do our maps, too

This is for both Michelle and Ray and a spinoff of dhoyne's idea. What about putting a little parking lot map in place for some of the lots that have multiple crags coming off of them. This may be overkill and an effort to make things idiotproof, but what about a quick sketch of the parking lot with an arrow pointing in the direction of Torrent and 715 with the trailheads to Roadside and The Zoo marked in relation to where you park.

Thanks so much for everyone's suggestions! I appreciate 'em all! FYI, SketchUp is what Google Earth uses for their 3D cities.

To answer a few questions/comments...
travlinyouth - SketchUp is kind of an architectural software I guess. It works in 3D model space so you can pretty much create anything.
bcrock - The program does make animation files. Definitely something to consider for more meandering clifflines.
kek-san - top of route indicators could be good but there is a limitation to SketchUp in that it's not used for adding graphics (i.e. points). I'll have to look into a plugin maybe...
J-Rock - It's not a GIS application so you can't just "bring in" hydro features (I only wish!). It doesn't use projections, just units. The cliff line is to scale and eventually I would like to take all the clifflines into Google Earth and create a RRG virtual reality.
Ascentionist - There's a free SketchUp version out there and the tutorials are rad. I'm using SketchUp Pro5.
Josephine - I like your idea of clicking in for more detail. May have to give that one some serious thought.
chh - Any edge (SU works with edges and faces) can be pulled out to get that steepness affect.
marathonmedic - I like the idea of showing parking areas at the RRG and those could be accurately and simply digitized off of imagery. It's beginning to look like I'm going to have some fun winter projects ahead for me!

The overall problem with SketchUp is that you can make things look pretty much as amazing as you want. It just depends on how much time you have. I'm going to start basic for now and make some changes based on the most common suggestions, i.e. north arrow, trail direction indicator...and think seriously about ways to incorporate other more advanced ideas like mouse over routes and route markers.

Thanks you guys!

Paul, that's a cool worm you made.

I think it is only slighlty better than a line drawing and probably ten times the work. But i am just a lame wade who don't know dick.

john e aragon wrote:I think it is only slighlty better than a line drawing and probably ten times the work. But i am just a lame wade who don't know dick.

It's actually the opposite.
Technology makes things easier, not harder.
That took me about an hour.