Nautical Map Depth Chart: Inkscape Step-By-Step How To Tutorial (OpenStreetMap Data)

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel in this video we're going to do an inkscape tutorial i'll show you how to make a nautical depth chart map like this one today we'll do florida this is the florida keys here highlighted in the past i've done regular maps and just done a generic ocean but this idea comes from a comment from over a month ago that says hello rick i request you make a video about cartography like florida with water depth level check out this link so i thought that was a great idea and i just couldn't find a way to make it in a succinct enough tutorial until now so today we'll go through a step-by-step beginner beginner intermediate level lesson where we can go over some basic inkscape skills we've broken down into two parts first we'll make the coastline using openstreetmap.org which is a site free open resource to get the map data and openstreetmap has a sister site called opencmap which is going to provide the water depth levels so let's begin let's queue up openstreetmap so this is the default before we go let's give credit where credit is due this is all free data that is contributed by people all over the world if you're going to use it outside of inkscape just make sure to give them credit so thank you openstreetmap and back to our map here so we'll do florida today this is beautiful but we can't download this version we need an svg format which they will provide if we choose a different setting so go over here to layers and choose standard and this is going to allow us to pull out a file that we can manipulate in inkscape so over here go to share set custom dimensions and you can have a bounding box here don't make it too big i just need the coastline and for some reason no matter where in the world you choose it's going to get a lot more of the ocean than you expect let's minimize this just for the keys down here for format you want to go to svg that's for the vector file and scale just change it from scale one to one sometimes if you push enter it'll automatically download if it doesn't then click download okay that took a couple seconds but here it is map nine i'm gonna drag it onto my desktop minimize this go back into inkscape get some open space and let's drag map nine or whatever yours is called just drag it back to the workspace you'll get a dialog box the first setting include svg image as an editable object dpi rendering for svg i change it to a hundred and then image rendering mode blocky so i'll push okay here we go i had to pause the recording for a second because my inkscape spins as it downloaded this big file but that's why we change the settings to the 100 dpi and then blocky just as an effort to reduce the file size so let's delete a lot of this extra information because again all we want is the coastline so let's zoom out and see what we're working with okay here's what we got so to extract just the coastline let's first push escape so nothing selected and double click somewhere on all this busy area with the different colors because i want to grab any item there we go so i've got all this color whatever that object is then hold shift make a bounding box over all that business and then delete so now what we have is just four quadrants that make up the ocean which creates the coastline that we need so a very important step we have to now unify these four quadrants so hold shift on all the quadrants go to path union that's a key step especially for new users to inkscape because we need one unified object to allow the other path functions to work properly so watch this i'm going to grab the create rectangles tool and the part that i want this is the coastline area we're going to highlight i'll drag out my rectangle it'll be on top of our ocean to start so go back to selector these right here this is hierarchy drop it down hierarchy until it's behind the ocean like that so actually maybe i want a little bit more of the coastline so i'll raise it up let's say this is the area that i want so i've got that behind there hold shift click the ocean again then go to path difference and there we go so now we have the coastline let me zoom in and show you so take a look how intricate that is it's actually too intricate for our needs if i double click on this it'll show all the different nodes that make up this shape you see that that's impressive but that's going to slow us down so let's go back to selector tool i click selector i'll zoom out again so you can see that the object is selected all the notes are still there they're just not highlighted and go to path simplify barely a noticeable change but look how much easier it is to move around now which means it's a lot lighter and won't cause as much stress on inkscape on to part two so the coastline came from openstreetmap let's go back there and we're going to get the water depth levels from open cmap so here's openstreetmap that's the main page this is another free resource openc map so thank you again for providing this information we'll go to full screen chart i have it queued up to florida here it is and there's the water depth level it's pretty cool pause the tutorial i noticed watching this back i forgot to mention you have to go to view and choose only marine profile if you don't have marine profile you don't get the water depth if you choose water depth it gives you boating information that's not really artistic so just choose unclick the depth contours just choose marine profile and that will give you this that's important information so we're gonna choose whatever part you want i like how there's more of a fluctuation in depth down here looks like florida and the keys are kind of on one shallow shelf so we need to do an actual screen capture so there's no download function built into this so if you don't know how to do a screen capture just put a comment below we'll see if i can help you out and if you do know how just grab the area that you think will look best how about that back in inkscape i can bring in the screen capture just dragging it into the workspace for the import settings i'll just go with the default from file and then rendering none okay and look at this look at the scale difference this is a beautiful svg download and here's an itty bitty screen capture so let's scale this up what we're going to do is use this and our trusty trace bitmap function to pull the colors out of this so if you've never used trace bitmap go to path trace bitmap you get your menu up here we're going to go to multiple scans and then choose colors so what this is going to do is it's going to look at this image and then extract the colors based on the number of scans that we choose let's go to 18 usually we click smooth stack and remove background in this case we don't want to choose stack so unclick stack if you do update it'll give you a preview and then click apply trace bitmap gives us this which is the same thing except now in vector format let me show you what it did so i can grab any of the colors if you double click you can pull them apart and this is how we're going to make the layers so let's just undo that because before we do that part i want to get rid of all this extra unnecessary stuff so again grab that color right there i'm going to do shift and capture everything i can in that area and then delete so the question comes up why didn't we just use this method for the coastline of florida and it comes down to two things one artistic value it just i think it's one thing to fudge on the exact contours of water depth levels but if you're familiar with florida or whatever map you're choosing you want a good coastline it's accurate and the best way to do that is from the openstreetmap data opencmap this is perfect for the contours it actually works out really well with a lighter file size but that's why we're doing it this way so we do want to clean up this part here so it's time for some bezier pen action just make a quick shape on top of the white area you're going to get rid of once you have it now i've got my opacity down so you can see what we're doing go back to selector tool i want to grab the initial shape so there's the initial shape there's the new shape path union so it didn't matter that was transparent now see there's some leftover parts there's a couple ways you can clean up that you can grab just the parts you want with the bounding box see how i've got those nodes i don't want anymore and then just push delete or like up here in the top corner you can just drag a node to connect the parts and through the magic of editing our depth contours are ready to go so i brought in a color palette because i want to go fast and cheat so if you want to play along with the exact colors i'll put the color codes in the description below now the deepest layer i already have set we're going to recolor each layer add a drop shadow and i'll show you how to put in a little light texturing so it almost looks like a relief we're going to repeat the same sequence for each layer and i'll show you another cheat or a hack where we can actually paste the styles to go faster so we'll grab this color here first i'll change it to the new color that i want raise it to the top so hierarchy here raise it to the top control d will duplicate it and here's the one time we have to set this up and then we'll copy the style each time so if i have it selected i want to go to stroke stroke i want it to have a 1.5 stroke the number doesn't matter but you see how it actually creates a wider part i'm going to be turning this into a drop shadow and it works better if it's a little bigger so we have got the stroke for fill go to full black and then blur just eyeball it maybe we'll try nine let's just go with 10 to be safe we can always change it so there is the part we're going to be copying so go to edit copy so now we'll drop it down one layer and we've got the new there's our drop shadow effect so that was the one time set up now watch the next one so i grab this layer i'll go to eyedropper change the color raises at the top hierarchy control d duplicates it then this top one will become the drop shadow edit paste style it automatically changes then just lower it down and move it and we'll repeat that each time so dropper around this color now raise it to the top ctrl d duplicates it edit paste style and then drop it down one more layer okay there's another editing time jump and here it is all the different depth levels and this is where you can have fun with it you can change the colors you don't have to use this color palette you can keep monochromatic if you want we'll drop florida in at the end but i do want to show you the part about texture if you want to add that it's not a true texture like we normally use from the filters it's going to be a pattern overlay so let's grab the bottom most depth we'll do control d to duplicate that and you see this thing here looks like an old tile linoleum click on that pattern now mine's defaulted to old paint it's one of the defaults so you should have it and we'll reduce the opacity down to i'll just type in 20 and just like before i'm going to go to edit copy so that is going to copy this style to the next one so grab the next one ctrl d edit paste style the next one ctrl d there's even a shortcut shift ctrl v and we'll go up the line one more time jump and we are done with the texturing i also realized i forgot to re-colorize the top four layers so sorry about that but let's bring in florida now let's zoom out i just happen to have it right over here pop this baby in there and again you can change the color scheme or palette anything you want i really did like this suggestion so thanks again for the idea if you have a nautical map location that you do want to see i think i'll do another one of these also if you have an idea for a different tutorial just put it down in the comments so thanks a lot i hope this was helpful and have fun with it

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 793

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Nautical, Nautical Map, Depth Chart, Contour, Rick Johanson, Florida, Florida Keys

Id: IEUsFI-cZsc

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021