I have a lake with great satellite coverage and was able to create a map with shape files from QGIS by highlighting reefs, islands, shore and shading them different colors, then using IMC to export an .at5 file.

Now I have some sonar recordings that I imported into RM, generated contours and exported into a shaded .at5 file.

How can I merge the 2 data sets for a hybrid map?

The exported RM shape files (Isobaths and contours) do not contain the pallet shadings from RM and I can't get the QGIS shape files to appear in RM as shaded elements.


Thanks
Dan

Getting a 500 uploading images.

Here is a link to the first map, the QGIS shape file map.
drive.google.com/file/d/0B2z47H-onnxNZFd...b0U/edit?usp=sharing

Image 2 is the map created from RM
drive.google.com/file/d/0B2z47H-onnxNYnV...cjQ/edit?usp=sharing

Hi Dan,

There are a couple of ways you should be able to achieve this:

The easiest is probably to create a user map in RM from your map project - right click in the contour view -> add components to map -> all components -> new user map. Make sure you have an AT5 palette selected, if you want to retain the colours in the project in the user map. In the user map you can then import your shapefiles as custom paths or custom polygons and edit them to have the colours you want. Then just export the user map in the AT5 format.

The second way is to combine everything outside of RM and run the IMC yourself. In this case you need to export the RM project as a set of Shapefiles, which should retain colour information if you have an AT5 palette selected.

Matt

I will try the user map option, but with the size of my number shape files this may be a challenge.

When I exported the shape files from RM they did not retain color. I am pretty sure I did this with the previous version and it retained color. I am using a custom AT5 palette and it exports as one purplish shaded color, I will select a default AT% palette and try again.

On a side note, when exporting an at5 from RF the islands are different colors than the main land is there any way to get those to be the same color?

Thanks
Dan

The Shapefile export hasn't changed, so the purple colour is probably because there are unsupported AT5 colours in the map. What unit are you viewing the maps on?
Try exporting with the simplest AT5 palette (white and blue), or creating a palette with a limited colour set. If you get the same issue, please let me know.

If you are comfortable working with QGis and the IMC then simply combining your existing shapefiles and the RM export in QGis is probably the quickest way to go.

The inverted shoreline is only exported when creating a raster map or exporting from a user map. In this case you get an "Inverted shoreline" shapefile which contains a polygon for the water body as a hole within a rectangle with the extent of the map. This is primarily useful for clipping raster images that are used as background colours, and the colour is fixed to the default Lowrance land colour. If you don't need raster clipping, you might consider just omitting this Shapefile from your IMC build - this will also let other map features (e.g. OSM) show, which would otherwise be obscured.

Currently viewing in LCX 113c, the exported at5 files views fine on the unit with the custom color palette.

It is the Isobaths shape file that will contain the contour shading correct? When I open the shape files in QGis it is one color.

The exported kmz has all the colors and looks fine in Google Earth.

I will try a different color palette.

Thanks.

Dan,
Shapefiles themselves do not have a concept of colour, or indeed of much of anything beyond the geometry of the shape that they contain, which is why your isobaths appear as a single colour in QGis. All of the styling attributes that the IMC uses are stored in custom fields known as attributes, which are stored along with the shapefile. Colours are stored in the attribute "COLOR" and are represented as an integer value that corresponds to a colour from the IMC/AT5 colour table. You can find these in the IMC documentation. You can see the attributes for a vector layer in QGis by right clicking on the layer in the layer list, and selecting Open Attribute Table. The attached image shows some of the attributes that go towards describing polygons for use in the IMC - you can get a full description of these in the IMC documentation.



If you want to combine your polygons in QGis, you will need to take care of adding the appropriate attributes to the polygons/paths that you have created. RM takes care of that for you if you import them into a user map and export from there, so that might be the easier option. Just save your set of shapes in QGis, go to your user map and select Import Custom Polygon/Path. You can then set colours etc and export either directly to AT5 or to a set of Shapefiles with the required attributes.

Matt