Hi all,
I'm trying to change the area style/coloring of a particular feature on my map. I'm trying to get away with not adding it to an InMemoryLayer, because beyond the color change at the initial rendering of the map, I don't need to do anything else with it. Essentially, I just want countries in colder climates to appear 'arctic' and ones in more warmer climates more 'green'. Can anyone lend a hand, or is this even possible?
-Dustin
Dustin,
There are a few ways to do this. How will you determine the cold ones from the hot ones? Is there something in your data or do you want to do it by lat & long? Once I know I can better help.
David
David,
To be honest, there’s no data that I’m really operating off of. I’m just looking at existing satellite photography and give my best effort to get those countries by their IDs. I was thinking about lat/long, but figured it would be just as easy to manually pick the set. And there’s no way to color a feature half in one color and half in another, correct?
-Dustin
Dustin,
Give me a little bit to think about this. I will get you some options on how to do this. Interesting though. :-)
David
David,
Thanks a lot for the help! Just trying to make the world look as realistic as I can. :)
-Dustin
Dustin,
There are a few ways of doing this that I can think of. The first is to consider using a satellite image for your higher extents. We have some good ones of the world we can share with you. In fact the demos ship with a nice ECW one. I think we have 250 megabyte one that is higher resolution as well. The next way would be to consider using some layers from World Map Kit. It has layers for frozen tundra, and forests and green areas. These can look quite good. I am not sure if you have that product or not. If you go that route you could look around on the web and see if you can find some shape files that are forest, green areas, ice areas etc and maybe you can get it for free.
Have you considered using Google Maps, Virtual Earth or Yahoo Maps as a background. I am not sur eon the licensing but that might be a viable option.
I suggest you go in this order… 1. Use the satellite image 2. try and find some free data out there for tundra or icy regions and last possibly purchase World Map Kit. I am not sure what your requirement are so I can’t say much beyond that.
One more interesting tidbit. I think you could draw image half one color and half the next however it would be extremely difficult to get right using the LinearPathGradientBrush in GDI+ I strongly suggest you not even think about it as that road if fraught with peril!!
David
Thanks very much David. Unfortunatley, with licensing and my particular application, using Google, Yahoo, etc. are out of the question.
Also, I have already purchased the World Map Kit, but I haven't found anything for frozen tundra. I have found lakes, sand, and evergreen, but that's it. I would really like to use this option for the sake of consitancy. It looks like I have 18.7GB worth of map data from the kit. Am I missing something?
And thanks for the tip about the split-colored shapes. I was really hoping I wouldn't have to delve into that.
-Dustin
Dustin,
I think what happened is that before the World Map kit we had Render USA and Render World. The Render World had allot of these kinds of layers. In the new World Map kit we went with a sparser look that matched better with Google Maps etc. Let me see if I can dig up some of the other layers and renderes from the Render World. Did you ever see Render World?
David
David,
No, I have not used Render World as we have only purchased our Map Suite products this past month. Your site seemed to recommend going with the World Map kit since it was in the 3.x family over the Render World/USA kits. Thanks for the help again!
-Dustin
David,
Any luck with finding these layers? I was looking through the Render World demo, and there’s a ton of useful stuff in there. Why was it taken out? And thanks again!
-Dustin
Dustin,
I have some news. We are going to send you the Render World DVD with all the layers and code. Note that the code was written for the 2.x platform but I think you can decipher it. The important part is that you will get the data. It took me awhile to get this all worked out with sales etc. I guess when we created the World Map Kit it was designed to replace Render USA, Render World and Render Canada. I think they did a good job but Render World had a really unique look to it. I think that what we are going to do in the future is include all of that data with World Map Kit and some alternate renderers to give the map a more natural look. In any event could you e-mail support@ThinkGeo.com and reference this post to get the DVD sent our to you?
David
David,
Thanks so much for all the help. I’ve emailed support as per your request. As always, your assistance is greatly appreciated.
-Dustin
Dustin,
Glad I could help. I am pretty sure there will be some new work going into World Map Kit next quarter and I will see if we can get the world data integrated with it to give some alternate looks. I will keep you posted if I find out more.
David