It occurs to me that I have been Blendering for a long time.
In fact, it’s been almost exactly a decade since I gave my first public presentation on the technique of generating shaded relief using Blender. And in that time, the method has been adopted far more widely than I could have ever anticipated (though I do take issue with some styles of its employment). My tutorial on the method has become the most popular thing I’ve ever written, by a wide margin. And, even though I don’t actually use Blender extensively, it’s possibly the thing I am most associated with in the cartographic world.
So on the occasion of this anniversary, I figured I’d take a moment to dig through my archives and remember how I got to this unexpected point.
Beginnings
I initially started using Blender because I wanted to make a chocolate bar. Specifically, one in the shape of Wisconsin, with some 3D terrain and scored along the county lines so that you could easily break them off as individual pieces. I knew that to make this I’d need to 3D print a mold of some sort, and that I’d need to learn some 3D modeling software.
So, on May 22, 2013, I started following some online tutorials to introduce me to the basics of using Blender, which I chose because it was free. I know the exact date because I mentioned it offhandedly in an email to a friend.
While I went through many hours of tutorials to get comfortable with the software, I never finished a draft of the chocolate mold. Instead, I began to experiment with making 3D oblique maps — which, while less exciting to me than a chocolate Wisconsin, was something else that I had planned on trying to learn to do using Blender.
One day in early June, I was still learning how to do 3D oblique views when I had an idea: What if I were to tilt the virtual camera downward and photograph the terrain directly from above? Would it produce a relief-like effect? To my satisfaction, it mostly worked.
I was pretty excited about this, and I spent the next few weeks experimenting with parameters while sharing the results with friends and colleagues at the UW Cartography Lab. Once I had sufficiently refined the method, I posted my initial experiments on this blog in July 2013.
Sharing
By the end of the year I had a good handle on the technique, and I published my first tutorial on New Year’s Day, 2014. It was a series of six YouTube videos that are unavailable now (they are quite outdated by this point), and in total they ran 72 minutes, and took days to prepare.
Once the video tutorial was ready, I began to share the technique more widely in 2014. I first presented it at the Mountain Cartography Workshop in Banff, Alberta, in April 2014. That’s what I’ll call the official unveiling, which makes 2024 the 10-year anniversary. I also gave a similar talk later that year in Pittsburgh at the NACIS Annual Meeting in October.
I should clarify at this point that I am almost certainly not the first person to think of using Blender for this purpose. 3D modeling software has been around a long while, and many people have used it to depict landscapes. Surely one of them made something that also looked like shaded relief, though I’m not knowledge enough about the 3D modeling community to be able to point to any specific examples of prior art.
And, while I may have independently happened upon the Blender relief technique, it was very much built upon the backs of the tutorials I took. Other Blender experts shared their knowledge through online coursework, putting me in a position to know just enough to realize I could make an attempt at relief.
Uptake
While I likely am not the earliest practitioner of any sort of Blender-to-relief technique, I do like to think that my work helped to popularize it among the cartographic community. I’m not sure exactly at what point it took off, but over the years I slowly heard more and more colleagues mentioning that it was now a standard part of their toolkit.
While I’d hoped to make Blender relief mainstream, I don’t think I particularly expected that it would turn out that way. Plenty of good ideas come and go in the cartographic community. There is simply so much to learn that we cannot become familiar with every nifty technique that comes our way. So, it’s been a pleasant surprise to see this one stick with so many people.
I eventually transitioned my video tutorial to a text one in late 2017, which still stands today. It’s easier to maintain than a video, and more accessible. It’s still the longest thing I’ve ever written, surpassing even my Master’s thesis. It may be this revised tutorial that really helped mainstream the method. It’s certainly the most popular thing on this blog, by far.
What’s interesting to me is the fact that, as the mapping community has integrated Blender more and more into its practices, my own experiences with it have remained largely unchanged. I have occasionally experimented with oblique terrain maps, but I mostly just use the program for occasional shaded relief work. I never really learned much beyond that. People may review my tutorial and conclude that I’m some sort of expert, but many of my colleagues have far more expansive Blender experience than I do. And that’s great! I wanted to use Blender for a few specific things, but my hope, when trying to share it with colleagues, was that others would build upon that base and begin exploring other things that could be done with the software. I’m pleased to see this hope come true.
Today
And so ten years later, here we are. Many cartographers know Blender, while online stores are awash in posters that pair Blender relief with old topographic maps. There’s even a “Blender look” that some people, including me, have commented on.
If I had my choice, I would select other projects of mine to become so well known, rather than my Blender work; there are plenty of things I’ve worked harder on and am prouder of. But we do not wholly control the form in which notoriety comes to us, and I am by no means scornful of the attention the technique has unexpectedly received. I’m proud of the work that I did in figuring out how to get Blender to do what I wanted (which, of course, involved plenty of knowledge gleaned from others online), and I’m pleased to have had far more of an impact on the profession than I could have imagined when I began messing around in the software near the start of my career.
somethingaboutmaps 