Tell Us About Yourself
Hi, I’m Aaron Koelker. I was introduced to GIS while pursuing an Environmental Science degree and quickly became hooked on its unique blend of problem solving, storytelling, and visual design. I then spent eight years with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection providing enterprise GIS support and working on a wide variety of mappy tasks from imagery and dashboards to scripts and wall posters. Recently, I moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York and joined the state’s Office of Information Technology Services Geospatial Services team, where I’m also helping to support a variety of GIS projects and tasks. Outside of work you can often find me working on maps for personal projects and exploring topics that interest me. Nature and history are two that I come back to often.
Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know)
St Kilda is a small cluster of islands in the North Atlantic, located about 40 miles west of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The human history of these islands dates back at least two millennia, and many ancient structures can still be found there today—including prehistoric stone rings, the walls and foundations of a medieval village, and over 1400 stone storage structures called cliets that are unique to the islands. The community on the main island, Hirta, peaked in the late 17th century. In 1930, the thirty-six remaining residents of St Kilda were evacuated to the mainland after their self-sufficient life on St Kilda had become unsustainable.
I thought the history and terrain of the islands were interesting and had been looking for a good project to help expand my Blender skills. While I’d dabbled with the software before for a couple of other map projects—and had used it to model some simple parts for my 3D printer—I wanted to try creating a map with a style that was different from the typical sort of shaded relief you most often see Blender used for in cartography.
Tell us about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map
The map uses DEMs (Digital Elevation Models) from the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal and was created mostly with Blender and Adobe Illustrator. Before rendering the islands in Blender, I merged the DEMs in QGIS and used Adobe Photoshop to commit a little cartographic deception by shifting the islands closer together than they are in reality. This, paired with the isometric perspective, helped to eliminate empty space and keep everything in a nice frame. The cell-shaded look was made using a Color Ramp node set to “Constant” along with a Grease Pencil object for the outlines. The village buildings were placed using Geometry nodes, which is a bit overkill, but I wanted an excuse to learn more about them. The labels, leader lines, and locator map were all added in Adobe Illustrator.