As I have said before, Last Exile is awesome ;D And as another tribute to its greatness, last summer I spent a month after grad school reconstructing one of the wonderful artifacts from the series: the Dusis map of the Grand Stream.

In the series, the map is only shown in a few scenes, and then usually from a distance or in brief passes (besides, DVD video is not exactly known for its high resolution imaging). Luckily, I had a copy of Aerial Log — a nice Last Exile art book — which included an image of the map among its pages, as well as nice closeups of the common emblems. Even though the image in the book is only 7 cm by 17 cm, a quick 1200 dpi scan later and I was in business :)

Enough blabbering; let’s compare, shall we? On the left we have the original image, taken from the Aerial Log artbook, and on the right my reconstruction (click for larger versions).

The first thing you’re likely to notice is that the right image is much brighter than the original. I had wanted to go through and recreate all of the smudges, shadows, and other wear marks in the original, but my basic skills were not up to the task. I’m sure I could have done a brute-force job in my photo editing tool of choice, but one of the primary goals of the project was to reproduce the image in a rescalable vector format (making these kinds of effects much harder to achieve).

36	Days Spent
5	Background Layers
240	Lines
538	Emblem Elements
26	Landmarks
24	Arrow Elements
731	Tiny Text
269	Normal Text
236	Marks
2069	Total Elements

There are a few small differences in the map text as well, to correct some of the more obvious errors — for example, right in the center it reads ΓΡΝΔ instead of ΓΡΑΝΔ, and ΤΕΛΙΤΟΡΨ instead of ΤΕΡΡΙΤΟΡΨ. Most of the text is Grenglish (English written with Greek letters ;), though I was disappointed to find out that most of the text is meaningless (i.e. “βανιλλα σκψ”, though I suppose that could be a euphemism for “clear skies”), and the larger passages are simply gibberish.

I think the most challenging part was picking out all the tiny XXI, VII, XXXIX, and other tiny Roman numerals. Even in my high-resolution scan, you only get a blurry sense of the shape of most of the tiniest text. Luckily, the map is used as a background image later in the Aerial Log book — although it is mostly obscured by other content, it helped in correlating the various numeral shapes so that I could squint them out in the unobstructed image ;)

And if anyone out there is interested in taking up the challenge, you can download my CorelDRAW vector file and tweak those colors and wear marks to your heart’s content :) Be sure to let me know how it works out!