Freestyling: Mapping Mountain Landscapes with Blender’s Non-Photorealistic Renderer - Andrew Tyrrell

Freestyling: Mapping Mountain Landscapes with Blender’s Non-Photorealistic Renderer
Andrew Tyrrell, South Arrow Maps (freelance cartographer)
Blender has been adopted by many cartographers. It is a useful tool for generating natural (though also potentially unnatural) looking terrain shading. Its physical based renderer can be used to create realistic effects which can be incorporated into maps as one or more raster layers. Less well known is Blender’s non-photorealistic renderer: Freestyle. Freestyle detects silhouettes, edges, and creases of virtual objects, which can be styled as vectors either within Blender or in graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator. This presentation provides an overview of how I use Freestyle to create stylised oblique views of mountain landscapes, illustrating backcountry hiking trips, summers spent in the wilderness, and trans-Alpine adventures.
This presentation was made at the 2024 annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). For more information on NACIS, check out NACIS.org.