Overview of vector tiles🔗

vector tiles are instructions for how the client should render geometries making them very portable. The main tradeoff is complexity of creating and styling . The alternative were raster tiles which you render upfront and store but they were much more difficult to manage and port around.

Vector tiles are instructions that can be in the following format:

GeoJSON (human readable, widely used): .json
TopoJSON (smaller than GeoJSON, shared line segments): .topojson
Mapbox Vector Tiles (protocol buffer): .mvt

They will be very tiles that store geometries on file server usually in the standard zoom/x/y e.g http://localhost/tiles/{layerName}/{z}/{x}/{y}.{format}?api_key={api_key}

There are lots of js libs that can render vector tiles:

Terminology🔗

Tileset - A tileset is a collection of raster or vector data broken up into a uniform grid of square tiles at 22 preset zoom levels. tilesets can be either raster or vectors

Vector tilesets - a.k.a vector tiles are used as basemaps.

MBTiles - a file format for storing tilesets. It’s designed to allow you to package up many files into a single tileset. MBTiles is an open specification based on the SQLite database. MBTiles can contain raster or vector tilesets.

Workflow A🔗

geojson to mbtiles via [tippicanoe](felt/tippecanoe: Build vector tilesets from large collections of GeoJSON features. (github.com))
tippicanoe to mvt files

3d Assets in vector tiles?🔗

One way of acheiveing 3d effects in vector tiles is to enbed height attribute to each geometry. Then as part of the front end rendering logic you can extrude based on this value. Example - Display buildings in 3D | Mapbox GL JS | Mapbox

Creating terrains raster basemaps?🔗

joerd/docs/formats.md at master · tilezen/joerd (github.com)

Fleeting notes about vector tiles

2023-08-20 2023-09-18 2023-10-10

References

Build Your Own Static Vector Tile Pipeline - Geovation Tech Blog