I realized last week that I never really shared out a map I made last year as a for-giggles poster for an Oceans GIS Forum. Anyway, what better way to promote the adventure and mystery of the oceans then to assemble a Science of Where Undersea Adventure Lego-like set, complete with Deep Sea Dawn minifigure?
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Last fall I was playing with some Lego bricks in Ken Fields‘ office talking about his cool Lego-style maps and I had an evil idea. What if I took a picture of the actual bricks to use as symbols in ArcGIS Pro? That way I could assemble all manner of Lego-like creations virtually. Plus they’d be maps, which, obviously, would rule. I had been in a bit of a Lego map kick, having collaborated with Jinnan Zhang on a Brickifier app to turn basemaps into Lego maps. Because Lego.
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Assets
So I snapped this picture of a couple of bricks.
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And I grabbed an official Lego color palette/name reference…
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And I cropped my image to just one stud and played with the tinting to generate a good-enough palette of bricks for mapping adventures. I changed the text to “LOGO” for posterity.
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Assembly
In Pro, I opened up a vector layer of oceanic bathymetry. And I promptly chose the Goode Homolosine projection, tailored to oceans.
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Beautiful! But not Lego. How could I make this thing look all bricky? Time to pop open the box and rip open all those cellophane bags of glorious bricks!
Virtual bricks. I created a new layer of squares, using the Tessellation tool.
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In order to transfer the bathymetric info from the bathymetric layer to my new bricky-grid layer, I used the Spatial Join tool. Spatial joins are dark magic. It steals the attributes of one layer based on its location relative to another! I so I asked for the bathymetric depth field at the center of each little square cell.
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And it totally worked. Next, I converted my now-bathymetrically-aware grid into a point layer, so I could assign each point a little brick picture.
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Using a circle symbol (just to get a preview of how it was coming), I chose a Graduated Color classification scheme. Coming along!
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Now to swap out these simple circle symbols for my “LOGO” stud pictures. For each class, I replaced the marker symbol with a picture symbol, uploading the picture, and sizing it so it fit in my map’s layout without gaps or overlaps. Trial and error.
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It looked like this (I also made a copy of the layer in semitransparent black and put it below the bricky layer, so it popped a bit)…
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Fun, huh? I mean, serious and useful and practical and scientific.
Now, with a set like this, you’d definitely want to work on a clean flat surface, like your kitchen table. And you might want to tape down some references to keep you oriented. Of course with a set this big, you’ll need some snacks or coffee to help get you through it.
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My favorite part of any Lego set was the minifigure. This set happens to come with a limited edition Deep Sea Dawn minifigure (a real custom minifigure, gifted to Dawn by the geo-generous Cartonaut).
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Extra Credit
And there we go! A Lego-like map of actual bathymetric data, assembled with little plastic brick images in ArcGIS Pro. No missing pieces!!
Now, I wanted my bathymetric map to actually look a bit 3D. Like the bricks were stacking up on top of each other. Extra points if you can piece together how I interleaved the shadow layers between each depth using Definition Queries on lots of copies of the brick bathymetry layer.
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Styles
So I did all this last fall, before I knew about Styles. Shame! I didn’t realize then that I could save each brick as a point symbol or a repeating marker fill symbol or any of that! Creating, re-using, and sharing, styles in Pro is totally awesome.
But luckily for you, ArcGenius Warren Davison is a style master. And he’s made a style that can give you similarly bricky results and has written a how-to. Check it out here.
Happy Assembling! John Nelson
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