I have a work in progress map and I was going to generate a map and take it with me on the boat so I could check a few things out.

The problem is that when I went to generate the map with the preset that I always use (AT5 Map with Flat Raster Background) it begins generating but doesn't seem to stop.

I shrunk the map area by quite a bit but that doesn't seem to help. Maybe its because there are a few area's with in the map that aren't completed yet (no sonar info) and that's confusing the program? I can't make the map area any smaller.

Any idea's?

Matt - If you don't mind looking at it, I sent you the work space though it's 20 mb! Hope it goes through

Thanks

Which part isn't generating, the AT5 export or the map within ReefMaster? If it is the AT5, you could try generating in vector mode instead within RM and then just exporting as a vector AT5. This is a much faster export process, but a slower build process within RM.
If you want to send it through I am happy to take a look - zip it up first, though!

The answer to your question - The preset style AT5 Export of the map using the AT5 Map with flat raster background. I tried it in both raster and vector. Both generate for a loooong time. The completed raster map works great on the Lowrance. I haven't tried the vector version yet. (The Reefmaster Help said I could do both raster and vector on that preset style)

Some things wrong some where. Some setting or something. The map finally completed generating, though it was after I left to go out in the boat. It never completed in the 45 minutes I was watching it!

So, after getting home and seeing it had completed, I began trouble shooting. The first thing I did, was compare file sizes with my other completed maps. Most of these lakes and there maps are as big and even bigger than the lake/project in question.

When I checked the properties of those comparison lakes, and I'm talking, the Shaded Relief folders, one was 10.92 Mb and the other and biggest was 22.5 Mb. Again, both of those lakes are bigger than the lake map I'm having trouble with. It's Shaded Relief folder is 455 MB! No wonder it took so long to generate! I'm puzzled as to how this can be.

I sent you the work space file. Maybe you can figure it out for me.

If I had to guess, I think it has something to do with the shore line. (Or maybe the amount of sonar tracks? 52 tracks @ 3.97 gigs. though a comparable lake map has 69 tracks @ 6.43 gig and it causes no trouble.)

While I'm only working on a small portion of the lake map in question, I originally got the shoreline done for the entire lake, and its a big lake, from google Earth Pro. So large that I realized that doing it on one map was out, so I had planned on breaking up the lake into smaller maps. (Let the Lowrance put them together while using the maps.) The one I'm having problems with is the first of those smaller map pieces.

The shoreline or ,kmz file is however, for the entire lake. It was my understanding though that when you use the "Define Map Boundary" function, your map project would only use the portion of shoreline "with-in" that boundary that you set. Maybe that's an incorrect assumption on my part and RM is trying to generate a map with the entire lake shoreline, including outside the "Define Map Boundary" area and in the process is making such a huge file causing the long Generate cycle? I don't know, its above my pay grade!

This is down to the big shoreline. The issue is that the background raster is being generated for the full size of the map + shoreline, and this is a very large area. Raster generates take quite a bit of time in the IMC, even though in this case much of that effort is wasted as the raster is "blank space". All I can suggest is that you either truncate the shoreline (temporarily) or use a vector export format. The latter is the easiest option, and will result in very much faster generate time. Alternatively I suppose you could just generate the full thing and wait for the 45 minutes..
Incidentally, the next version of RM won't have this problem as shorelines are automatically truncated to the bounding box of the map area.

Thanks for looking at that Matt.

I guessed right then. It was the shoreline of the entire lake that RM was seeing and using, instead of just the shoreline inside of the boundary box. I look forward to the next version of RM where that problem is solved.

A full "double check" of the theory will come when I do the next section of the lake. I'll do a section of about the same size, maybe even a bit smaller and see what happens when I try to generate a map. If it takes a long time again then the shoreline is surely the culprit!

Finally, though there is no way for me to check it, the other theory that occurred to me this morning was that I had accidentally recorded some of the tracks in "Sonar and Side Scan" which makes for much bigger .slg files. (I always try to make sure only Sonar is set but sometimes I mess up!) I thought that maybe this was why the Work Space .rmdb was 455 mb. RM using the entire shoreline sounds like the real reason though.

I suppose I could go back into Google Earth Pro and re-do the shoreline in smaller sections, but frankly? I'm to damned lazy so I'll keep up the way I'm going.

BTW, the generated map, in Raster, looks and works great on my Lowrance. I tried a vector version too but it 1) Didn't generate any faster in RM and 2) Didn't look nearly as good on the Lowrance as the Raster version.

Thanks Again Matt.

OldBassTard wrote:
This won't make any difference to the map that is generated, and if you have the disk space then I would always advise recording sidescan as well as it might come in useful one day.

One issue I did notice in your map is that you have the same shoreline entered twice, once as an island and once as a shoreline. This is resulting in your map spreading beyond the shoreline, and is fixed by deleting the boundary that is set to "island".

I was able to generate your map in raster mode in a little under 10 minutes on my development PC - but this could just be because it is faster than yours!

Also, at the moment RM is limited to using colours from the AT5 colour set when creating vector maps. From the next release, it will also be possible to export RGB colours to AT5 vector maps (for the more recent Lowrance units that support it), and as a result the vector maps can look a lot nicer.

Thanks Matt