The purpose of forming a set of rasters is to accelerate the display of maps containing a large number of objects (more than 1 000 000) in WEB applications. Display acceleration is achieved by the caching method: the display of the vector map area is replaced by the display of the area of a pre-built raster.

Input data of the program are:

• vector map in MAP, SIT, SITX format
• user maps in SIT, SITX format
• files of MPT projects
• matrixes of layers, heights, qualities in MTW, MTQ format
• rasters in RSW format

Output data of the program are:

• graphic files (*.png);
• graphic files (*.jpg);
• databases (*.mbtiles, *.bir, *.gpkg).

The Imagery Creator program includes a module for remote administration of the imagerycreator.xml settings file. The web administration module is located in the ImageryCreator\admin\admin.php folder. To run a remote administrator in a browser, type http://localhost/ImageryCreator/admin/admin.php in the URL address of the line.

Administration can be performed in secure mode using the https protocol.

When the page loads for the first time, you must enter your username and password.

When creating a new project or editing an existing one, you need to do the following actions:

- Set a unique ID of the project (should not be repeated) in the "Unique ID" field.
- Set the name of the tile project in the "Tile project name" field.
- Select the path to the tile data by clicking on the button of selecting the path to the tile data.
- Select tile data matrixes.
- Select the required scales (scale 0 approximately corresponds to scale 1 : 620 000 000, 20 - 1 : 600).
- Click on the "Set" button for saving the changes in the current project.

To cut tiles, select a project from the data tree and click the "Run" button.

To start cutting tiles, you must click on the "Run" button in the window that opens.

To stop cutting tiles, click on the "Stop" button.

The process of generating large-volume raster maps (more than 10 gigabytes) can take quite a long time (from one hour or more). Therefore, the execution time is calculated during execution. The execution time is calculated at the finishing of recording the first 500 megabytes of raster data (from 4 to 10 minutes from the start of the process) and is specified until the end of the process. The difference between the actual run time and the original estimated run time is typically less than 20 percent. At the end of the process, the nested directory contains the constructed rasters (tiles).

For example, it took 1 day and 20 hours to generate a raster map of Russia, for a base scale of 1 : 25,000, which occupies 5.7 GB in vector form. Rasterization was performed on a scale from 1 : 1,000,000 to 1: 50,000, containing 60 million objects on 87 sheets, with uncompressed raster sizes of no more than 2.7 GB. 46 matrixes were added to the main map.

In total, about 1,200,000,000 tiles were created in png format, with the size of each tile being 256x256 pixels, with a total file size of 4.5 TB.

Creating empty tiles

To set this mode, use the "Do not create empty tiles" option. When this mode is selected, the mode of disk space saving and tile analysis will be enabled. Empty tiles will not be created, but the overall speed of creating tiles will be reduced due to the efforts of analyzing the generated tiles.

Saving tiles into the Mbtiles database

To set this mode, use the Mbtiles tile format option. When this mode is selected, the tiles will be saved into the database in the Mbtiles format.
This mode will save space on your hard disk, simplify the process of transferring tiles between servers or disks. Since, unlike cutting into files, all data is in one database file. When you select the "Overwrite database" mode, the previous database for this project will be deleted and created anew. Otherwise, the data will be added into the existing one. Disabling the mode will increase the time for creating tiles, since the program will need to analyze the contents of the database, but it will allow you to supplement or update an existing database.

When the option "Tile numbering as in TMS" is enabled, the numbers of tiles created in folders and in the SQLite database will differ from the standard ones and will correspond to the Tile Map Server numbering (row=2^z - row - 1).

Saving tiles into the GPKG, BIR database

To set this mode, use the tile format option GPKG (GeoPackage) or BIR. When this mode is selected, the tiles will be saved into the database. This format is an array of SQLite databases in which tiles are stored. Tiles are stored in png, jpg, png8 or hmp formats. The hmp format represent tiles with a size of 65x65 pixels containing height data (digital matrixes of heights). By dividing the entire surface of the Earth into several databases, it is possible to perform a faster search for tiles compared to the mbtiles format. The GPKG, BIR formats allow you to display data on the north and south poles, since the information in it is stored in the EPSG:4326 projection of the OGC GoogleCRS84Quad matrix. You can read more about formats in the documentation "Project of description of the BIR format", "Description of the GeoPackage standard".

For cutting in the local coordinate system , it is necessary: Form a description of the local coordinate system in the file c:\Program Files\Panorama\GISWebServiceSE\appservice\crslist.xml. To do this, it is possible to use the mode of saving a map passport with saving in XML in GIS Panorama (you need to fill in the EPSG code (must be more than 65536), name and identifier (the identifier can contain only English letters, numbers, symbol «.», «:»)).

Add a matrix of tiles. In the administrator, click on the "Add matrix - Add" button. Set the matrix parameters according to the item: Adding user matrixes.