Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By : Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP
Book Image

Mastering QGIS - Second Edition

By: Kurt Menke, GISP, Paolo Corti, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, Luigi Pirelli, John Van Hoesen, GISP

Overview of this book

QGIS is an open source solution to GIS. It is widely used by GIS professionals all over the world. It is the leading alternative to the proprietary GIS software. Although QGIS is described as intuitive, it is also by default complex. Knowing which tools to use and how to apply them is essential to producing valuable deliverables on time. Starting with a refresher on the QGIS basics, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom QGIS plugin. From the refresher, we will recap how to create, populate, and manage a spatial database. You’ll also walk through styling GIS data, from creating custom symbols and color ramps to using blending modes. In the next section, you will discover how to prepare vector, heat maps, and create live layer effects, labeling, and raster data for processing. You’ll also discover advanced data creation and editing techniques. The last third of the book covers the more technical aspects of QGIS such as using LAStools and GRASS GIS’s integration with the Processing Toolbox, how to automate workflows with batch processing, and how to create graphical models. Finally, you will see how to create and run Python data processing scripts and write your own QGIS plugin with pyqgis. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of QGIS, and will be ready to use it for any type of GIS work.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering QGIS - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating 3D views with QGIS2ThreeJS


This plugin can be used to create beautiful 3D views. It is an implementation of the three.js JavaScript library. It allows you to set up data in QGIS Desktop and export the view to a 3D rendering in a web browser. The 3D view can be navigated with zoom, pan, and tilt controls.

In this section, you will learn how to make 3D views of terrain and how to extrude features into 3D space. The first step is to open the Plugin Manager and install QGIS2ThreeJS. The plugin appears as both a button on the web toolbar and as an item under the Web menu.

Creating 3D views of terrain

The QGIS2ThreeJS plugin can be configured quickly to generate a 3D view of terrain. Here you will use the QGIS terrain.qgs project to generate a view of the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, NM. The project has two layers, a styled DEM, and a hillshade layer. The hillshade layer has been set up with a multiply blending mode to create a color hillshade effect.

To generate the 3D view, follow...