How to Make Maps

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to be taking a look at how to make maps now right up front there are a million different ways to skin a cat when it comes to making maps this is just one way of literally thousands the field of cartography in general is very broad and there are a lot of different ways to do what i'm about to show you but today we're going to be taking a look at how to make very very simple maps yourself and to make a map we're going to use a program called qgis or qgis however you want to say it this is a gis program it's a suite of software that is used to do all kinds of things in the world of gis and making maps is just one very useful thing that you can do with it most people are familiar with how to make maps in the arcmap series of of programs but let's be honest arcmap is expensive and it's really hard to get for a lot of people so we're going to use qgis because it's free so let's get started all right right when you log into qgis or when you start the program you're going to get a lot of blank screens here so what we're going to want to do is start a new empty project that's pretty easy to do just double click there you could also go over here to project new or if you have a template set up that works as well but what i'm going to do is save this in a location that i can get to it and we're going to call this test that'll work just fine just for this exercise alright so gis in general is an interesting kind of really career field but it's only as good as the data that you put into it so if you want a really nice map you gotta have a lot of really nice data otherwise you're going to have a kind of a not so good map so what we're going to do first is bring in some data so let's get started with that alright so the first thing that we need to do to bring in other data is bring in a plug-in called quick map services so what we need to do is go over here to plugins uh click on the manage and install plugins wait for this to kind of open up and now these are all of the plugins that you can use in qgis or at least these are the ones that are pre-loaded there's 791 at least as of this version but you can bring in more of course so what we're going to do is go up here into the search bar and type in quick map services and as you can see i already have it installed but there it is right there quick map services and you can click install if it uh i already have it installed but you can click install and bring it in all right so once you bring in your quick map services what you can do is go back up to the toolbar and click the web little tab here and you can see quick map services right there now from there you can go over here to the side hover over osm and now you see this little tab here which says osm standard now this is open street map that's what this is and if i click this it will bring in a layer which is the open street map from google so this allows us to you can you can use this on your map if you want but this actually allows us to actually see what we're what's going on so instead of having a blank canvas we can now move around the world and see what kind of areas we want to make maps of now i should admit that bringing in quick map services like that is actually kind of the long way to do it most of the time uh in qgis it's already loaded so you can actually go over here to your layers right click remove it i'm just going to go ahead and delete it back to the blank canvas and we can see right here under xyz tiles openstreetmap is already there so kind of a little cheat that comes with qgis i don't know if that's going to be there for future versions so i just wanted to show you the long way of doing things just in case all right so now that we've got our open street map what we can do is select the area that we want to make a map of so let's go ahead and check out ukraine here as they are in the news a lot lately let's go check out right here in the heart of the issue let's go to the little city of donetsk right here on the russian side of the sort of invasion as you can see there google even has the front line it's a little bit outdated but whatever um so yeah this is the area that i want to make the map of just for demonstration sake i thought it'd be kind of interesting to do this area all right so now that we've got our area that we want to make a map of let's bring in some data to actually populate the map since we brought in quick map services we now have an easy way to do this this is very uh very simple what we can do is go to web quick map services here and then click search qms now this will pop up a little uh menu over here on the right side of the screen and as you can see here now you can search for all kinds of things so you can see that i already have the two populated but i'll go ahead and search for google roads i'll bring in google roads and i'll add that as you can see that brings it in down here to the bottom left as a layer and we'll uh we'll fix this in just a second so that we can see it let's bring in the other one and i'll explain what they mean let's bring in uh toppo let's search for that and see if it comes up first yeah it's right here about midway down the list esri world topo so let's bring that in we're just waiting for a second for it to download because it's downloading the whole earth okay now we can click this little tiny x and close that menu so now over here on all layers uh if you haven't ever used a gis platform before what you have to do is kind of drag these so that the ones that you want are on the top so let me let me bring openstreetmap down to the bottom so that it's behind everything and is now now we can see we have the google roads popping up along with the esri world topographic map all right so this is kind of interesting let me zoom in a little bit here so that we can get this right zoom level just right all right so yeah now we can see we can turn off the openstreetmap behind this and of course it's it disappears we can also turn off the topographic map and now we have just a black and white street map of the area now this is very handy if you live in a city and you're you're not really so much concerned about topographic stuff sometimes the the contour lines and the shading can get in the way especially if you're trying to memorize street names which is a great thing to do if you live in a city is to memorize the street names for your city very handy to do so this is how you can make maps like that if you want but let's go ahead and bring in the topographic map because we want to see green spaces as well we want to see the areas where there's parks and stuff like that all right so we're cooking now we've got our data in here we've got google roads listed we've got the world topographic map listed we've got the openstreetmap turned off because we don't need it to navigate uh you can just do a map of the openstreetmap if you want um i personally don't really like it because it's it doesn't really work that well but um you can use it if you wish but let's just go with what we've got for now this is simple enough as is so i've got this set to the scale of one to twenty four thousand uh you can adjust the scale down here at the bottom of the screen uh it's not super critical for this step but i just wanted to kind of center it here now before we get going let's do one more thing i find that doing this particular step is kind of helpful at this stage before we start making our map so what we're going to do is bring in another plug-in and this plugin is pretty handy so we're going to go to manage and install plugins and we're going to search for declination there we go magnetic declination that's the plugin you don't necessarily need to do this but i think it's kind of handy so i'm going to bring this in as you can see i already have it installed and what we're going to do is go to plugins and as you can see it is right there magnetic declination so we're going to click that and this brings up this little nice little plug in here now my screen size makes this box a little compressed but that's okay so what we're going to do is we're going to click uh lat long on map we're going to click somewhere like over here that's perfectly fine and what it's doing is this plugin tells us the magnetic declination declination is a very important thing to have on a map so we want to know what it is for this specific area so i went ahead and got the location from the map and now i can click calculate and again my screen is compressing this but as you can see it's 8.5 degrees now what we can do is draw compass rows if we want you don't necessarily need to do this but i kind of like to do it i'm going to go ahead and draw the compass rows here as you can see it just kind of wherever i clicked is where it's going to drop it so i'm going to drop it right there cool handy to have so let me go ahead and cancel this uh let me grab my hand tool back here and we can look at this if you want this is just kind of a neat little plug-in it's not super critical to do it this way you can just google what the magnetic declination is of an area but now i know it is eight degrees and 33 minutes east so really eight degrees uh east so i'm going to take note of that so let me go ahead and grab a pencil and write that down because we are going to be adding that to our map later alright so you can either leave this compass rose on there it's going to be on your map if you want to leave it there so in order to kind of clean things up i just tend to go over here to the layers once i've got my number i don't need it anymore i can just i can just delete it but you can leave it on there if you like it all right so once we have all of our data in there we can bring in kmz's we can bring in a million other different data sources but we're just going to use these two simple ones for now what we can do is build the map now to do that it's very simple all we have to do is go up here to project new print layout and you can give it a name if you want i'll give it a name of test that's perfectly fine and now here we're in the print layout now this will open up another window as you can see here if i grab that down and bring it down you can see that we're still working here in the main main menu here but now we are in the print layout so what you want to do is determine okay what size map do you want to print in this case i have the map set up for landscape we can actually go over here to layout and choose the different kinds of settings it's actually under page properties and then you can choose your paper size depending on what kind of printer you want i just like a4 is pretty normal a lot of times i'll print out custom sized maps to fit in specific kinds of map cases i find that to be pretty handy but either way once you get your page set now we can bring in the map so what we're going to do is click add item and add map now we're just going to draw draw a square it's going to be the map there we go and there's our map now there's a couple little tricks that get kind of frustrating if you were to grab this like it is you're going to move it all over the page so what you can do is kind of snap it to the center this is just what i like to do and then you can use this little tool over here the little uh four blue arrows tool and now when you click that you can move the map inside the frame of the piece of paper that you're going to be printing on very handy if you want to kind of move it around a little bit and this will come in handy later all right so once you bring your map in and you've got it all drawn in the right size that you want oh you can edit the scale so usually by messing around with a map and kind of changing things around you're going to realize i want the scale to be something a little different so what you can do is go up here to map one and click right click on it and then click item properties and that's going to bring you down to this menu here just in case you were lost clicking around things gis programs tend to be a little bit hard to understand for people who don't use them so it's easy to get lost in these menus but again just click map one item properties and it'll bring you right back to this menu here so what we're going to do is we can see the scale at this particular zoom level is 96 000 so one to ninety six thousand so very oddball kind of scale so we're gonna change it to something a little bit more normal so one to twenty four 000 that should be pretty good give it just a second to think and boom there we go now we can of course using our little move around tool there i forget the actual name for these things now we can kind of adjust where we want the map so let's go ahead and center the map kind of here this looks like a good spot we've got the the road names in there is fine we've got all the green spaces fine that's pretty good looks very nice all right now obviously for our map you're going to want grid lines so let's go ahead and go over here to again your item properties just in case you got off of it and you can go right down here to grids now this one can get a little bit confusing but really all you need to do is if you have nothing here you can click plus and add uh the grid one there select it and then click modify grid so now we have a lot of different options to put in our grid lines uh this is a little bit confusing at times depending on what kind of datum you're using for your map but hopefully this will be a little bit simpler since i'm just using a standard datum that most people would use so what we're going to do here is put in our grid and we can choose a lot of different options here i'm going to put in the grids that i normally put in so what we're going to do is we want solid lines yep grid type solid the coordinate reference system crs there we want to use the map one so whatever map the whatever i use to set up the map is what we're going to use yep that's fine uh interview will be map units yep that's perfectly fine as well you can all you can change this to be um specific to your map if you wanted to look more aesthetically pleasing you can change it however you wanted it and for the interval here i'm going to change the x-axis here to 1000 and 1000 units on the y-axis as well and as we can see there there's our grid we have 1 000 units wide and 1 000 units tall as we are in decimal degrees here so we don't want any offset uh just you you really don't want to do any offset whatsoever because you don't want to uh skew your navigation stuff so uh what we're going to do is we're going to bring in a frame as well just to make it look good frame it all up and then keep scrolling down the page here and we're going to click draw coordinates now this is where things should be a little bit more clear now we actually have the decimal degrees up there at the top and on the sides and on the bottom now as we can see here we have some we have a little bit of overlap so as we can see here on the left and right it's a little bit a little bit cramped so what i want to do is just put these put these labels along one side and along the bottom so what i can do here is change that based on these menu options over here so for the left yep show all i want yep i want all the data on the left now on the right i don't so i want to disable the right boom it goes away along the top i also don't want it along the top so boom goes away and on the bottom i want the grids and i also want to put decimal with suffix i forgot to do that that's a little easier because now now we know north and east so there you go now as we can see here we still have some overlap here so this is area we're not going to we're not going to print so what we need to do is resize our map and to do that's pretty easy if you click the hand here like i do pretty much every time nothing's going to happen you have to go over here and click this little selection tool and this will allow you to grab the corners and bring it in there we go just like that and now we have everything on the page and since we have a lot of white space over here we want to make sure that we can center it so again use your selection tool there and now we can move around inside the map as we can see we can center things up however we like and before i forget if you are trying to squeeze as much space out of your sheet of paper as possible which you can also do is go over here to your map grid properties again which is to go to your item properties go to your grid modify grid and then scroll all the way to the bottom and you can see down here at the bottom coordinate preset precision what you can do the default is three you can change that to zero what that will do is eliminate the uh eliminate the extra zeros behind your decimal so now you have just a clean decimal degree uh display of the coordinates and now you can actually squeeze just a little bit more space out of your map we can extend it just a tad bit more and make make the map as efficient as possible all right now that we've got our grid all set we're starting to look like a map here but let's add a couple more things to make this actually look a little bit more functionally like a map so what we're going to do is go over here to add item and we're going to add a label so we're going to give our map a name so we're going to click new item properties whatever doesn't really matter it's just going to bring in a a gigantic text box uh not super handy to have a text box that big we'll shrink it down quite a bit but to edit the text we can go over here to the side menu here we could say this is test map one so we can mess around with the font as well we can choose a different kind of font let's see what would be good something something rather bold works quite well you change the size of the font as well let's go with 28 i think that'll be too big that's fine this is really just adding a text box it's not that big of a deal you can mess around with this there's all different kinds of options for this but this will work just fine so now we've got this in there let's go ahead and add in another thing let's add in a scale bar this is always handy to have on maps so we're going to click scale bar and then we're going to draw it let's see down here in the right hand corner is my favorite place to put them now scale bars can be a little confusing depending on your map coordinate system because everything is is written in such a way the gis program can understand it not necessarily how humans can understand it all right so for our scale bar here let's choose since we're at one to twenty four thousand uh is the is the scale of the map let's go to choose kilometers and let's use we just want to show a scale bar that is one kilometer in length so unit multiplier of one and for segments obviously if we're having a scale bar that is one kilometer wide and we have the width of each segment is 0.25 that's 0.25 kilometers which means that we need four segments so we're going to click right four boom there we go now we have a one kilometer scale bar we can drag anywhere we want let's drag it somewhere where it's a little convenient to see don't want to overlap any lines but i think it's okay if it's this far down the map that'll be fine right there perfect what we also want to do is add in our declination which is why we got the declination figures earlier before before we even made the map so let's go ahead and add that in we can go up here to add item add a label and we'll just draw a little text box down here and we can edit that text box using the little box over here off to the right so let's go ahead and add in declination alright so there we go we've got the declination in there and we can also only put a just make that a little easier to understand and we can also since i'm kind of dumb when it comes to land navigation uh we can put in a little helpful reminder uh to which way to add or subtract when it comes to the uh actual compass bearing so in this case since we are east right we have eight degrees east it's going to be to uh subtract to get your compass magnetic bearing so what i'm going to do is put a little short little reminder in there for myself to subtract [Music] for mag and that will help me remember to subtract 8 degrees in order to get the magnetic bearing off of this map so let's go ahead and shrink this let's change the font again to something like decently bold i want to justify it right so that it sits there nice and out of the way get everything all lined up just perfectly so it doesn't take up too much space on the map there we go once we got it really where we want it we can add in one more thing and that is to add in another text box for the scale so let's go ahead and add in another label over here and since this map is one to twenty four thousand that's going to be our scale so let's type over here in the box one 24 000 and we'll use the same font just to make sure that it all lines up and we'll make that font size a little bit larger just so that it's a little bit more clear let's go to 14 that'll work now from here we can go to layout export as pdf and there we go and there we have it there's our map obviously practice makes perfect so the more that you practice with these kinds of systems the better your maps will be you'll be able to learn how to use more settings to your advantage you'll be able to pull in more data sources things like elevation and imagery and all kinds of neat stuff to make your maps really become works of art but for now a simple map will work just fine especially if you're trying to make hundreds of these for your operational area at different scales and with different kinds of data on them and imagery and all kinds of stuff so really some some quick and dirty maps can be very handy too so that's all i've got for today thank you for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade

Channel: S2 Underground

Views: 19,918

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Id: 850LCN0KcNM

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021