I'm using QGIS 2.16.1 on Windows to try to extract elevation data into curves that I can use to cut/build a wooden topo map. I'm vaguely following this guidance, but also am changing things up a bit as needed (my data is across multiple files, etc). I'm in really deep water here as I'm a woodworker and not a mapping person (yet!).
I've imported 6 raster layers of elevation data from the ArcGRID datasets, merged them into a Virtual Raster, and ran Raster > Extraction > Contour at an interval of 125. After several minutes of chug, I get the contours. Awesome!
My problem: Trying to save myself some data chunking time (I'm doing some smoothing and eliminating of too-small-for-wood contours), I wanted to eliminate the data and contours that are outside the boundary of the region I wanted to topo (several of the data files only overlap my region by a tiny amount). I loaded a shapefile for the region boundary (it's a national park so finding that was easy) and used Raster > Extraction > Clipper to clip the Virtual Raster to the shape. It appears to work and generate a new Clipped Raster (my name for it) in the right shape that visually matches the original data. Problem is, when I try to run Contour on the Clipped Raster, it generates an ERROR 1: CPLRealloc(): Out of memory allocating 416 bytes.
As first I assumed the clipping shape was too complex, so I tried with just a square and it fails with the same error. Seems any Clipping of the Virtual Raster drives the error.
Is there any way I can fix this or any other method to take the elevation data from multiple files, "combine it" and extract contours?
