Turning Historical Map into 3D Map

Software Used:

• ArcGIS
• QGIS
• Blender

Source for the Old Maps and Digital Elevation Model The first step in the process is to find an old digital vintage map of an area with some relief and a decent image resolution

Historical maps are contemporary maps from a specific point in time, showing land use and settlement patterns as recorded at that point. Historians use historical maps for several purposes:

As tools for reconstructing the past, to the extent that maps provide records of features, landscapes, cities, and places that may not exist anymore or that exist but have been transformed

Historical maps can be challenging to read, hence their recent transformation into three-dimensional views. 3D Mapping technology is used to profile objects and create a 3-dimensional view that can be mapped onto the real world.

As the name suggests, it is a 3-dimensional representation of objects meaning it maps objects on the x, y, and z-axis. 3D mapping represents elevation and location, making it helpful in developing scale models of features in buildings or the Earth.

This added layer or rather added dimension helps visualize data and has increased the number of applications and use cases for Geodata.

The Following paragraphs give a detailed explanation of how to turn your historical map into 3D.

Software Used:

• ArcGIS
• QGIS
• Blender

Source for the Old Maps and Digital Elevation Model

The first step in the process is to find an old digital vintage map of an area with some relief and a decent image resolution or if you have an old paper map of an area, you can scan and use it.

Tip: Look at the contour lines in the map and take note of the height and how packed or spaced the contour lines are – tightly packed contours have higher relief than spaced contours.

A map of flat lands will not produce the beautiful result we want, we need some mountainous terrain that will make the 3D effect pop up. A good source to get old vintage maps is the USGS TopoView which serves a large collection of georeferenced topographic maps covering the US.

There are dozens of other sources of old maps on the internet. Download the DEM of the area from the USGS Earth Explorer.

Georeferencing the Map

This is the first and most important step – we would use the ArcGIS software in georeferencing the map using the coordinates on the map to register the four (4) points around the map. It is important as the concept to create the 3D map is overlaying the old map on the DEM (Relief)/Hillshade.

After we have successfully georeferenced the map. We then create a polygon around the border of the map area. This will be used to clip the DEM to the map extent.

We’ll then create an outer boundary for the paper boundary of the map.

QGIS

We’ll import the DEM and the shapefile into QGIS and use the create new raster tool ‘r.mapcalc.simple’ this will create a new raster from the DEM using the paper boundary polygon. Then we use the ‘r.null’ tool to calculate the null values. After creating the raster we’ll save it as a render format (RGB) ‘.tif ‘

BLENDER

We suggest watching a few videos on how to navigate a blender before moving on to the next steps. If you haven’t installed Blender yet, it can be downloaded Here.

We hope the above steps will help you get the hang of using the ArcGis And QGIS Software for turning maps into 3D. You can also experiment with other kinds of maps and let us know how the transformation worked.

Turning Historical Map into 3D Map