Official comment
The DEM part exists as a file upload and the tile source is also added using external hosting (see 3rd Party Datasource) in the settings.
It would be of a great help if, for remote operation without any internet connection, it was possible to import a geotiff as a custom basemap ou DEM without having to go through MapBox or any other online service.
In this previous post from 7 years ago that also suggest that (https://support.dronesmadeeasy.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115010545346-Only-a-few-things-are-needed-to-make-MapPilots-a-killer-app), the response was that would not come "because mobile devices lack the horsepower required to deal with the large files. Most people's computers have a hard time with them." It wasn't a great answer back then and it is just worst 7 years later.
A geotiff can we as tiny or as big as one might want, these files aren't inherently hard to read. However, in order to simplify the management of these files by Map Pilot Pro, some checks could be done at loading time to make sure the file meet some strict requirements. For example:
- Must be less than 1 GB
- Must use JPEG compression
- Must be tiled with 256x256 blocks
- Must contains internals overviews 2,4,8,16,32,64
- Must contains either three bands (red-green-blue order) or only one band (gray)
- Must use 8-bit unsigned integers (for 3 bands) or 32-bit floats (for single band)
- Must use WGS84 / Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG:3857) coordinate reference system (I assume that is what is served by MapBox)
All those requirements could be easily meet by any one using a GIS for remote sensing. I could even write a simple QGIS plugin for anyone to use if it could help.
The DEM part exists as a file upload and the tile source is also added using external hosting (see 3rd Party Datasource) in the settings.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
All this still require going through an online service. The custom basemap requires uploading to Mapbox and the custom DEM requires uploading to Maps Made Easy. The idea is to be able to do all this only with the Map Pilot Pro app. Considering that doing any pre-processing directly on the phone/tablet could be taxing, all this would need to be done beforehand, thus my list of strict requirements to only accept a file that can be directly read by Map Pilot Pro.