I finally sequestered myself to a tiny room in my house to work on this project! This is a 3D rendering of the geographic region of Palestine. I say geographic region, because no, Palestine is not a state but we're not going to get into that at all here. A brief Wikipedia history on Palestine tells us that it is the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and has a rich history and culture because of all the powers, tribes and kingdoms that have reigned over it. Not only is it rich in history, it has a rich and rugged terrain as well. To the west is the coastal plain along Mediterranean Sea, which if you've never been, is absolutely gorgeous. To the east is the Jordan River Valley containing the Jordan River, Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The elevation ranges from 1030m to -417m at the lowest point on earth. Along this gorgeous landscape are hills and valleys that make you wonder what traveling would have been like in Ancient days.
My mother-in-law asked me to make this map in order to depict the kind of landscape Joseph and Mary would have crossed when they travelled from Galilee to Bethlehem. There are two probable paths that they took. The first is the most direct route which is a straight shot south through the central hills. This path would have resulted in many hill climbs up and down for nearly 30 miles.
The second probable path is much longer, over 100 miles, in which they would have started heading south west then swung east around the central hills to escape the drastic elevation changes. While this path was much longer, it has substantially less dramatic elevation changes with the highest peak at 1,200 feet and only 50 feet or so changes through the eastern side of the central hills. The elevation profiles below shows how the elevation would have changed for these paths. So thank you mother-in-law for this amazing project idea! I hope you like it and sorry it's a little late...
I created this 3D rendering similarly to how I created my Muir Woods topographic map and the Mariana Trench shaded relief. First, I mosaicked, clipped and rescaled the height maps in ArcGIS Pro. I used 30-Meter SRTM tiles from this great website created by Derek Watkins. I make that part sound easy because it's just the use of simple image analyst tools, but it takes a lot of trial and error to get the clipping correct, the rescale and the entire area covered. I don't want to glaze over this part of the process because it's extremely important to making a nice looking 3D terrain.
Then, in Blender, I used the heightmap as a displacement map and set the material base color to an image texture. I chose a 1922 historic map of the Palestine geographical region with Jerusalem from The Edinburgh Geographical Institute as my image overlay. The image was provided as a raster dataset on the Harvard Geospatial Library. I discovered this repository during my research phase of this project and I can't wait to see what else I can find on here.
Before getting a full render, I played with the lighting more this time around. I added three suns all at the same low angle and location, but this created a more dramatic shadow off the hills and mountains making the terrain look more defined.
I hope you enjoyed this 3D rendering of Palestine and take a second to consider the kinds of challenges people had to go through in the Ancient days just to travel home for Christmas.
Height map - http://dwtkns.com/srtm30m/
Map overlay - Palestine. (with) Jerusalem. The Edinburgh Geographical Institute, John Bartholomew & Co. "The Times" atlas. (London: The Times 1922) (Raster Image)
Harvard Geospatial Library - http://hgl.harvard.edu:8080/opengeoportal/
History of Palestine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine