Discussion: Topo Layout

Topo Layout

Hi, I need advice on topo's. What is an acceptable amount of routes on one photo? I assume making too dense will have issues , but I also prefer one picture as simpler to navigate. When should one create sectors to divide things up.

I think there isn't a universal answer here, it depends on the rock and how good of a photo can you get. E.g. if the photo is taken right under the rock, the issue is the photo becomes distorted along the edges due to wide lens. But if you can get a good picture from further away or from a drone, I would say around 20 routes per picture makes sense

I agree that there will probably be no universal answer and most of the time, you will be limited by the position, where you can take a picture anyway. I looked up a few topos and I would say, if the purpose oft the topo is, that you should be able to locate a route at a crag, most of the time you cannot fit more than 10 routes at max in one topo image. If it is more to get a rough overview (for example if the start oft each route is indicated in the bottom oft the crag), maybe 20 might be possible. You have to be aware, that due to the different perspective, pictures taken from several ten meters away from the crag vor even with a drone are not particularly helpful for route localization, if you are standing right at the base.

Like mentioned before, it really depends a lot on the angle of the photo, the quality and also the aspect ratio.

Wide/flat topos (panorama)

If you manage to get a very wide ("flat") topo, e.g. using photo stitching software, then you can also get good results.

However, there are some quirks (bugs?)

The same topo on the crag page shows with thick lines that make it difficult to see the rock features underneath

- image-1706519834531.png

The same topo viewed from a route detail pages has nice thin lines. Brendan Heywood fyi

- image-1706519870957.png

There is a related github issue here: https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/1701

Some other examples:

The bad angle makes this a very questionable topo (probably drone required to take a good photo)

- image-1706520149588.png

A topo with lots of routes on it (usable to locate your route? ...maybe...)

- image-1706520245937.png

On boulders you will sometimes find that there are a lot of combinations and links. It can make sense to duplicate the same topo image and just draw a smaller subset of boulders for each image to avoid an unreadable chaos

- image-1706520491513.png

Chaos topo - what goes where?

- image-1706520686055.png

I would say, if the picture could include a lot of routes like some of those above, it's best drawing the lines of some significant ones to give a guidance of where things are. Then, the rest of the routes can be found by counting left or right of those shown.

How to choose a significant route? Well, I'd say, the first and last of that section, as well as something in the middle, or routes that meander around or traverse, rather than routes that simply go straight up.

I can imagine a world where the topo tool would be like an interactive map, where as you zoom in and out it would add and remove details like street names and smaller local streets. If the topo is too dense with data then it would reduce the visual weight of some routes to faint very thin lines with no labels. The lines which are selected to be normal and thicker would be the most popular routes but also based on how overlapped they are. As you zoom in details would appear. At the end of the day topos are just maps.

Another thing is if you have a topo of a very large cliff which has say 200m of rock face covered in routes (like alto-mijares above) vs another topo which only has 50m of rock with 5 routes, then things like the symbols for anchors should be broadly proportional to their real life size. To enable this to work each topo would need to have some sort of scaling factor, and this could be inferred from the number of routes in the topo and their route length / density.

Brendan Heywood the giga pixel topos of El Chorro are a bit like that:

https://www.cartowall.com/es/crag/el-chorro/topos

Thanks for the help guys. I have some great ideas now.

I saw an app for US region, crags have been scanned by lidar, all 3d, really cool

> I saw an app for US region, crags have been scanned by lidar, all 3d, really cool

It does look cool. Here's an example link/instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpju8FFgQvc/

theres an australian one too called red point climbing i think