This is so great. Is your backend set up to do other vector paths besides just map tiles?
Yup. The settings are tuned for maps right now, but we can take any raster image with up to four b&w layers and send it through the same process.
Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
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Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#22beautiful. @gabesmed is the wood sustainable & ethically sourced?
MacBeath, where he gets his hardwood, is making an effort on this (I was over there a few weeks ago to buy wood and brought it up).
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heya, I'm the developer behind Woodcut Maps! The site is built on python/django and hosted on AWS. Most of the interesting work happens in python with PIL, numpy and scipy. We download maps tiles (Google for now, working on an OSM render path), and split them into channels for landscape, water, roads and parks. Then we apply several steps of scipy's image morphology filters to get the masks ready for laser cutting an…
This is a bit out of scope but I would love to have a similarly crafted version of john snow's classic cholera map.
Oh we could totally do that. One color for roads, one for bars, one for background. We could probably do Minard's Napoleon's March map too (minus the labels) just for fun. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#24Cancun is a "designed" city and the core districts are laid out inspired in Mayan hieroglyphs. This makes terrible urbanism but some pretty sweet woodcut maps. http://woodcutmaps.com/11254
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#25For the curious: Default is $105 for an 8"x8" map. 20"x16" is $350. It appears that wood species choice has no impact on pricing, but I didn't want to abuse their render queue with any more experiments. :) Also, to the creators - it would be great to have a "pricing" page to explain this!
Good idea, will do. Right now for simplicity's sake we just have the wood species not affect pricing even though they greatly vary in cost to us. We're coming out with some really gorgeous burled woods soon that are a bit pricier -- we'll probably add variable pricing based on wood species once those choices are available.
As a former woodworker, I thought that might be the case. :)
There's also a lot to be said for pricing simplicity, though. You might consider just having a "premium woods" option that gives you access to the high end veneers, rather than passing costs directly along. If you make it more complicated, you'll also cause people to do a bunch of re-renders, which may wind up costing you more (and causing people to get bored and give up).
I don't envy you the task of working with fraction-of-an-inch wide irregular-edged burl veneer strips!
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#26I'd love to hear the dev talk about the architecture of this service – there's nice work for the site itself with queued renderers, and apparently back-end work to generate the laser-cutting instructions. More on the process: http://woodcutmaps.com/process
Heya, I'm the developer behind Woodcut Maps! The site is built on python/django and hosted on AWS. Most of the interesting work happens in python with PIL, numpy and scipy. We download maps tiles (Google for now, working on an OSM render path), and split them into channels for landscape, water, roads and parks. Then we apply several steps of scipy's image morphology filters to get the masks ready for laser cutting an…
I'm really interested in hearing more about your process. See you at WhereCamp.
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#27[deleted]
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#28Are there copyright issues with using Google's maps?
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#29This is probably the most interesting company I have read about on this site. The love using software to make something physical. I will definitely consider a purchase in the future.
Re: Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you
#30Started out thinking that this was more parquetry than what I imagine is called 'woodcut'. Turns out it's probably marquetry instead. All from Wikipedia:
"Parquetry is a geometric mosaic of wood pieces used for decorative effect."
"The use of curved and natural shapes constitutes marquetry rather than parquetry."
"Marquetry (also spelled as marqueterie) is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs or pictures."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquetry
And, so I learned something new.