How to use MapTiler Ocean

Map design Advanced cartography examples

This set of articles represents a recommended selection of advanced cartography examples.

  1. How to make custom map design in MapTiler Cloud
  2. How to style a retro map
  3. How to style a pop art map
  4. Map styled like a picture
  5. How to make an Oktoberfest map
  6. How to style a choropleth map in the Customize
  7. How to use MapTiler Ocean

MapTiler Ocean focuses on global bathymetry. You can now have oceans, seas and even landforms with labels, contours with more precise depth, special color ramps in shades of blue and the bathymetry terrain hillshade in your maps. This article will help you to leverage the MapTiler Ocean map style to the hilt!

To use the MapTiler Ocean, you need to set up a MapTiler Cloud account. If you don’t have one yet, don’t hesitate to sign up for free!

MapTiler Ocean datasets

MapTiler Ocean map style uses various sources of data. The core one is MapTiler Ocean - world gridded bathymetry vector tiles. MapTiler Ocean tiles include detailed bathymetry features such as ocean floor polygons with maximum depth (minimal depth value), contours, landforms or labels.

Additionally, there is the terrain hill shading for both land and ocean, land polygons and selected features from MapTiler Planet (such as rivers or island names) to provide better context information.

Customize the MapTiler Ocean

You can directly use the Ocean map style from MapTiler Cloud or find it at this link. It is listed as a Standard Map in your account’s Maps section.

To easily adjust the map colors, use Customize a Copy button that will take you to the Customize interface. In the Quick edits panel, you can change the color scheme and create a completely different map experience in a few clicks!

ocean-quick-edits.png

Advanced editing of colors

Advanced users can adjust the map colors more extensively in the Layers tab. You can change all layers included in the map and make it completely in your desired style. Labels are split into Lake, River, Water, Undersea, Depth, Landform, Glacier contour, Contour and Island layers. Terrain hillshading colors and exaggeration can be adjusted separately for land (Terrain RGB layer) and ocean (Ocean RGB layer). There are also shadow layers highlighting the land polygons that can be changed.

For the ocean floor changing based on the depth values, there are 29 layers of different colors. Thanks to this, bathymetry color ramps can be adjusted to a completely different gradient by changing each of the layers. Either adjust the color or the depth value or both!

ocean-depth-colors.png

The colors go from the lightest blue for a depth of 0 m to -50 m to the darkest for a depth of -11,000 m to -12,000 m. We are keeping consistent intervals between the depths.

The Depth labels on contours are also changing based on the ocean floor. With the depth getting lower than -4,000 m, the labels are paled out to stand out in the dark waters. The case expression was used here to differentiate between two colors and two levels of zooming.

ocean-depth-labels.png

You can adjust the expressions prepared by our cartographers or write your own based on the MapLibre GL JS Style specification. Expressions can be written in the JSON editor tab (accessible by Alt+E shortcut).

Adding placenames and more geographical context

By default, the Ocean map doesn’t include any labels or borders on the land. You can easily add any geographical context information from MapTiler Planet in Customize. Click on the “Plus” button in the Layer tab and choose adding of a new Layer. Here, you will see all available Data sources which you can pull into your map. In this example, we will use borders and country labels from the MapTiler Planet source. In case you would like to know more technical details, please visit the MapTiler Planet schema page.

ocean-add-borders.png

As for the borders, these are available from the boundary layer. When asked to specify the layer’s data content, please scroll to Filter admin_level dialogue and choose only level 2 (country borders). Click on Continue and provide a unique name to your new border layer before adding it to your map.

ocean-add-country-borders.png

Now you can style your borders based on your preference. We are using #466D86 hex code for outline color and width changing based on zoom level.

ocean-style-borders.png

You can also add country labels using the same workflow. Country labels are available from the place layer of MapTiler Planet. When asked to specify the layer’s data content, please scroll to Filter class dialogue and choose only country class. As a Visualization before adding the labels to your map, choose Symbol. This way, you will be able to style the data as text labels.

ocean-add-country-labels.png

Now, you can adjust the Fill color for example to the same one as for the borders. Don’t forget to add also the Outline color to make your texts easily readable. You can also change the font and size or transform the text into upper case.

ocean-style-country-labels.png

Next steps

Continue to How to style individual buildings to learn how to highlight specific buildings on your map.