Map Animation

Climbing Contagion, a 5.10 Sport Multipitch on Lake Mead Buttress

I and a friend climbed this route in October of 2023. We had an enjoyable time climbing and thought we were in for a relatively easy day. We didn’t expect to get lost on the walk out, so we were several hours past our expected return deadline, which prompted numerous unanswered texts and phone calls from worried friends. We were always safe, just lost.

I built the below animation to memorialize a fun day of climbing and some not-so-fun tribulations that, happily, ended well.

I modeled the terrain using my favorite open-source tool, Blender, and overlayed Google Maps data.

The motion of the camera is intended to simulate the flight of an FPV drone—apologies for any motion sickness!

I then added atmospheric elements to simulate the arc of the sun as morning transitioned to night, reflecting the sunlight of the actual day.

The most time consuming aspect of animation is timing, requiring tweaks of individual frames to synchronize all the elements: callouts, route paths, lighting, and camera flight.