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MapTiler set land polygon fill with transparent ocean


I'm looking to create simple basemap tiles that fill in the land, but leave the oceans transparent. The problem is that all of the data sources have the ocean with the polygons that create the water/land boundaries, so when making the oceans transparent it also makes much of the land transparent.

Does anyone know of a way to simple to do a land fill that will cover the coastline geographies. Essentially, I need the opposite of the water polygon fill. I've been using MapTiler to create and serve my tiles, but I'm open to whatever solution can solve this problem.

I believe the problem requires a data source that creates land polygons, rather than just the ocean polygons. I did find the Natural Earth land polygons, but I received an error from MapTiler that the dataset was too big. The 50m dataset was not fine enough detail.


Solution

  • The only solution that I found that was satisfactory was to use QGIS and their map tile plugin, then to use the GSSHG dataset, which has high res land fill data. Unfortunately there is not a vector tile solution with QGIS, so creating the raster tiles can take quite a long time depending on the zoom level necessary. Zoom 10 took me over 2 days to complete on my Macbook.