Discussion: OCAD, contours and sprint maps

Can I change the order of the layers in OCAD so that contours go behind buildings but in front of pretty much everything else?

If yes, could someone give me a dummies guide to how?!

Thanks!

Symbol -> Colors

Select the 'Brown' row, and use the Down button at the bottom to move it below the building interior colour (on mine it's called "Black 50-65% (building)")

Yey! AP is way more helpful than OCAD help. Thanks Juffy!

Not an answer to the question, but I like having the contours visible through the buildings.

Spike, then people might notice when more contours go in than come out...

If it's the experimental physics building on a university campus, that might still be valid. :)

Spike - I agree...especially in a dense built-up area, you could easily lose track of which way the contours are going if you can only see fragments of them. Having said that, one runner commented (after running on my most recent sprint map) that a couple of times he read contours through buildings as being paths.

I thought the ISSOM required contours to be visible through buildings.

In the text for symbol 101, Contour, it says:

To emphasize the 3-dimensional effect of the contour line image, contour lines shall be represented as continuous lines through all symbols, also building (526.1) and canopy(526.2).

ISSOM2007 (591 kB pdf)

I also like seeing the contours in the buildings, but often the contours inside buildings are completely fictitious. They're just drawn in a "fair curve" to link equal elevations outside the building.

I thought the ISSOM required contours to be visible through buildings.

It does, but I thought I'd try something new and exciting for AP by answering the question before the thread dissolves into a technical discussion about mapping standards and that-thing-that-happened-at-the-'87-WOC-final.

It's a weird concept, I know. :)

Arguably, contours should follow the downhill side of the building. Or maybe the uphill side, depending on whether you consider the floor or the roof to be the relevant part. A contour passing through a building rarely makes any legitimate sense, especially if it's diagonal or curved.

Yeah, certainly the right thing to do was to answer the question that was asked. But now that is out-of-the-way, we're free to dissolve into the other thing...

Whats really fun is to delete everything on the map except the contours.

There is just one big hill on my map, and it's in the open, and I am very happy with my choice. So stuff ISSOM :)

I'll come down on the side of cedarcreek and the 2008 and 2010 WOC sprint mappers - contours through buildings link equal elevations outside the building. If mappers followed jj's suggestion then for a building on a very steep hill you would have to show several contour lines merging into one on each side of the building, and a very thick line going around the building - and the upper side would make more sense.

Sprint maps are already difficult to draw - one that Juffy just completed had 6200 objects. Forcing mappers to draw all their contours in the manner suggested by jj is just too much work.

By the way Juffy, where did you get the object count?

Zoom out so you can see the whole thing, drag-select around the map, read object count in bottom left corner. Sometimes the high-tech ways are the best. ;)

If mappers followed jj's suggestion then for a building on a very steep hill you would have to show several contour lines merging into one on each side of the building, and a very thick line going around the building

Why would the line be thick?

Forcing mappers to draw all their contours in the manner suggested by jj is just too much work.

Why would this be significantly more work? (I'm willing to agree that it might not be the most helpful to someone readng the map, which is what matters.)

'Why would the line be thick?' Maybe not, but aesthetically for me the line should be thicker than a single contour to indicate that there are more than one.

Taking the WOC 2010 map as an example, there are possibly 50 or more buildings (I didn't count them) where you would have to redraw the contours. I normally curve all my contour lines, so to then have to redraw them around rectangles would be a pain.

On the WOC 2008 sprint map (http://www.woc2008.cz/files/images/scontent/maps/s...) there are fewer, but larger buildings, and many more contours to change. On the main hill there are some areas where 4 contours would have to go around a building, then back to a very narrow passage, then around another building. As it is currently represented, that hill (which the runners are confronted with right from the Start) is easy to comprehend. With the contours drawn as you suggest the runners might not immediately understand the significance of the hill and make a less than optimum route choice, throwing the race almost before they've started.

You wouldn't have to redraw them if you did them that way in the first place.

However, like I said, although curved contours don't make "legitimate sense", meaning that they don't correspond to places of equal height in reality, I do agree that, for example, the contours on that sprint map are probably going to be more helpful to the runner than any other option.

If you're drawing them over an image (such as a photogrammetric base) yes, but for an urban map wouldn't it be more likely that you'd import your contours directly into OCAD? Then you'd have to change them all. Even if drawing over a base, it would be quite detailed work in a steep area with a lot of buildings, and quite tricky if you use the curve tool.

@ Becks original post, if all the contour lines were hidden under the buildings on that WOC 2008 map, most people wouldn't even realise there was a major hill there.

My instinctive reaction is that if you drew contours around the edge of the building, the end result would be no better than hiding contours under the building - especially in dense built-up areas, you're only going to have tiny segments of the contours actually showing you where the hill is.

Also, since the building boundary line overprints the contour (even if the grey fill doesn't), you'd end up with a black line with a very thin brown border - exaggerating the contour outside the building would just reduce readability.

Me, I'm still trying to figure how to do the contours on the spiral stairs in Edinburgh.
If you end them at the centre, then clockwise takes you up, anticlockwise takes you down. So far so good, but where to begin them again?

Graeme, just renormalise and unwrap.
http://www.math.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~inou/pararenorm/nea...

D'oh! why didn't I think of that?
Now I just need to find an infinite amount of time in which to draw it up:)

Contours for this? http://www.google.co.nz/imgres?imgurl=http://www.e...

Spiral staircases in next years Big Weekend then?