My email traffic indicates that a lot of visitors to this page are looking for some simple tools that will allow them to make 3D maps easily. They may not be concerned with the finer points of digital cartography but would still like to make decent maps without a lot of fuss. With these visitors in mind, I have put together what I call the "DEM Starter Kit" that will allow a complete novice to get great results in a hurry.

The first piece of the kit is the new USGS National Elevation Dataset web page. Although this page was intended for those wanting to purchase DEM data from the USGS NED, the map index interface provides a great way for amateurs to produce shaded relief maps of any part of the United States.

After navigating to the site, you are presented with an on-line viewer. You just window down to the area of interest. (the USGS has made this a "seamless" data set so there is no need to locate quads), select your system variables from the left radio button menu and then hit the "refresh map" button to display a shaded image with DLG overlays. There is even a button to prepare a print page of your resulting map. A rendering of the type of image produced by this site is shown on the right.

The third part of the kit is the DeLorme mapping package called TopoUSA. You have to pay for this program ($99.95 plus shipping) but it is worth the price. This application probably deserves its own section. TopoUSA is a self-contained application for making shaded-relief topo maps and a lot more. You get the viewer, a complete topographical map data set for the entire USA, and an elevation dataset derived from the NED described above. There is no downloading of software or data, no file conversions, and no overlay gymnastics. You can produce impressive topo overlay images with a few clicks of the mouse.

TopoUSA has the ability to print maps in single-page and mural mode. In mural mode, the map is divided amongst several pages so that you can produce printed maps with the amount of detail associated with traditional folded paper maps. You can also output the image as a BMP file. Add to this the capability to integrate the software with popular GPS receivers and you have an inexpensive mapping package with a lot of capability.

Let's compare a map created with TopoUSA to our de-facto standard, Charles Kitterman's Mt. Rainer image from the previous section. TopoUSA's version is shown to the right. Although this map does not possess the fine detail of the standard, the TopoUSA image took just minutes to make, not days.