Create a Mapbox Account

First you need to create an account with Mapbox. This is a free account. Goto Mapbox.com and create a free account using your email address. Within your account everyone has default map styles, and you save your own map styles and data to continue to work on. Once you have an account, have a look around the account page and read the above introduction to Mapbox to gain a quick understanding of what the 3 tabs: Styles, Tilesets and Datasets mean.

Create a New Tileset

Download the Shapefile zip* showing Melbourne's building footprints

1. Once signed into your Mapbox account, goto Studio> Tilesets > New Tleset > upload the shapefile.zip

Once uploaded, click on the filename to open the information page and inspect the data. The tileset information page shows you information about the tileset you just uploaded including:

• In the centre, you can see the 11 properties from the original file: dev_key and status. The uploaded tileset maintains the properties from the original data file, which you can use when adding style rules for the tileset.
• The map ID is the unique identifier for this tileset.
• Format, Type, Size, and Bounds provide general information about the tileset.
• Zoom extent tells you the zoom levels at which tiles were generated for your uploaded data. Don’t worry too much about this number. Vector tiles are made up of vector data and can be overzoomed and styled up to zoom level 22

*Note: A geojson file is usually smaller and faster to load to Mapbox than a shapefile, but the conversion to geojson has converted numerical columns we need for our map into strings.