The Best New Features of QGIS 3.x

hi i'm kurt menke with bird's eye view gis and the q cooperative i'm based in albuquerque new mexico and i'm going to be talking about the best new features of qgis 3x one of my favorite topics and i'm going to start right with this title slide here this is a mesh data set from september 2017 which was a historic hurricane season in the atlantic basin and we're looking at a specific day september 9th here so we're seeing hurricane jose on this day building in the eastern caribbean and hurricane irma having already gone through most of the caribbean and about to make landfall in florida and on this map we're seeing a couple new features that i wanted to highlight first we're seeing label call outs this is a fairly new feature and we can format these as shown on this map as simple lines or as manhattan lines another feature is with the mesh data vectors they're being shown as traces in this example and you can also now show them as streamlines so a really nice new feature that makes for pretty stunning visuals and i want to frame this talk a little bit i'm coming at this in part as an author so last fall i published my most recent book with hans vonderquast qgis for hydrological applications and about a year and three months ago i had published discover qgis 3x and you'll see recognize the image on the cover of that now and these are both with locate press and so one thing i do as an author is track new features to kind of judge when i'm going to have to update these books so i'm going to break out of this presentation for a minute and get into qgis okay so here i am in qgis and i have a kind of a unique project open here which shows the timeline of qgis with time across the x-axis and qgis versions up the y-axis and i want to credit uh etienne tremai with this you can download the the data and project for this from his github repo here and um i've added a few things to it but this is both to show a new feature of qgis 314 pi which is the temporal controller which is one of the most groundbreaking new developments in qgis in recent in the last year but this is also going to help me frame the talk in terms of time so if we look at this project here you notice in the layers panel that these layers many of them have this little clock icon in the indicator space and if i hover over one of these it tells me it's a temporal layer so if i double click on that icon it opens up the layer properties for that layer and you'll notice that there's now a temporal tab available and this allows me to temporarily enable that layer put it into temporal context and so i can do this in a number of ways i can use a fixed time range i can use attributes in my attribute table and some other options there so you can do this for vector raster mesh wmts all the different data models are supported with this functionality now you'll also notice that there's a new temporal controller panel button up here and i'm going to click that to turn the temporal controller panel on and activate time for this project and what i can do now go back to the beginning here i can start stepping through time and as we do this we see the current releases um for the given date and we have both the the current stable release and the long-term release so here we have madeira 314. so this talk is going to focus um on a particular chunk of time so if we go up here to just after cue just 3 6 news was released that's when i published discover qgis 3x and that's kind of the point of departure for this talk we're going to start looking at new features that have come out with zanzibar 38 all the way up to 314 pi so this will be the the period of time that we're going to focus on so we're going to look at other examples of using the temporal controller but you can do a lot with it the banners are a point layer for example that are set up with a raster image marker the discover cue just book is as well so you can um temporarily enable all sorts of things and it supports all the renderers that we have in qgis okay so now i'm back in my presentation and another thing i want to mention as we go through this is that there are a lot of new features so in preparation for this talk i went through the visual change logs and you can visit those from this url here and i made it a list of all the the major new features and by category um since qgis 3 8 and there's a lot of them and in a 20 minute talk there's no way i can cover all of this so i'm going to hit the highlights and i may not hit all the features that you consider the most important this is just my opinion of course but i'm going to try to hit you know some of the more major features that have happened over the last year plus in qgis in the category of usability and aggravation avoidance we now have a nice new feature so here i have a map of covet 19 cases per 1 million and if i want to select some features to get some statistics on a couple states i'm sitting here with my shift key down selecting individual counties and sometimes you know you go through quite a bit of time selecting features and then accidentally miss click and the selection goes away well now you can go to the edit menu and choose reselect features to get that selection back which is a huge win so now if i want to get basic statistics another new feature is that i can drag and drop layers and inputs onto processing algorithms so that's really nice i guess drag and drop you can also drag layers between instances of qgis now and i can run and get my statistics another new feature related to this is the deselect features also has an option now to just deselect features from the current layer now we're going to switch into symbology improvements and this is a a repo man map i've been working on and if i open up the style manager i think we're all familiar with being able to manage marker line fill and color ramp styles and and tag them in to create categories but there's now also um a text format tab and this you can use this to store um text formats with font color size for title fonts and things like that i use it for storing titles for different clients under label settings you can store label styles which will include label placement settings and things like that as well there's also a legend patch tab where i can have different legend patches on legends and we'll see some examples of those later but you can load them by url or file you can create your own by hitting the plus button and creating different shapes using expressions you can tag these like all the other symbols so we'll see some examples of this going forward but it's a fantastic set of new features there another symbology improvement is the random marker fill and this is one of the many symbology features and print composer features that has been produced thanks to slayer which is the esri compatibility suite which allows you to import mxds and layer files from the esri environment into qgis and so part of that development by northroad has been to create parallel styling options in qgis so that mxds for example can be imported successfully and one of these is this random marker fill which is here being used to show a wetland wetland polygons using an svg marker you can also use this renderer to create a dot density effect so here i'm using a density based count setting with this marker and for the point count i'm using the data defined override to point to a column for covid cases in my data set and just make the dots very very small we also now have a contour renderer so here i'm going to duplicate the dem and style it as contours and from this point i also have the option to set up index contours for this layer with a thicker line for example you can set the interval to whatever you need it to be and then all your other styling options like blending modes are available as well so this map basically just has a dem styled three different ways as as a colored dem as a hill shade and as contours to pull that whole effect together so revisiting those custom legend patches that are now available this is a quick map that i had to do a few weeks ago that was a large poster with a lot of busy cartography on it and to make things a lot more intuitive i can use custom legend patch shapes and this is a huge improvement and um you can you know make things much more kind of natural and intuitive to the reader for example having a buffer icon for roadside buffers or a contour icon for topographic contours another nice thing with this is that you can override the legend patch on a per item basis so in this example not only was this category of potential treatments bigger polygons but i also needed to make the patch shape a little bigger to render all the marker fills within it so i i can do that on a individual basis and there's some support that comes with this so tim sutton has put up a nice youtube video on how to make your own custom legend patch shapes and there's also now a github qgis legend patch repo that several people have contributed to where you can download patches and a lot of these came from that repo with the print composer there's a lot of changes as well so there's now a dedicated north arrow tool there's a lot of new scale bar styles that have come out with 314 and again this is all thanks to slayer development you can now have um fractions in a scale bar and adjust have controls for subdivisions and subdivision height they're now related to the temporal controller temporal controls in the print layout so you can have set a temporal range for what you want shown on the map and there's also data defined overrides that you can use in concert with those for legends on a print composition you now have better control over columns being able to split layers and also a data defined override for the account argument and bookmarks are now also exposed within the print composition so if you select a map item you have a tool there that lets you get to your bookmarks and zoom to the extent of a bookmark in your print composition one of the major new features is support for a new data provider vector tiles so if you open up the data source manager you'll see there's now a vector tile option where you can connect to online sources of vector tiles here i'm going to browse to a local mb tiles data set and add that to my map and one of the nice features of vector tiles is quick easy styling so i'm going to zoom to a bookmark here and open up the properties for this layer and i can load an openstreetmap qml style file to quickly style these openstreetmap vector tiles to use as a base map there's also a plug-in called map tiler which you can install and it comes with several pre-styled open street map sets of vector tiles so here i'm going to install the the topo or load the topo style from from that plugin and i get a nice open street map styling in in that topo style another feature of vector tiles is that there is processing algorithms for generating your own vector tile sets so this is the algorithm for writing mb tiles switching to the graphical modeler there's been a lot of improvements i'm only going to cover a few but if you move elements around now you get kind of highlighted connector lines you can also select multiple items in your graphical modeler and move them together and there's a now an ad group box option so this is just a visual grouping to to make your model more intuitive in a busy model you can break it into sections visually so here i'm just going to highlight the area that's the final steps in this model and apply a color to the box that kind of fits with what we're working on kind of a light green color and so now i have a nice box around the final steps of the model there's another really nice new algorithm called conditional branch which lets you set up some logical operations you know if yes do this if no do that and there's now variables that you can create at the the model scope to work in your model another processing tool thing i'd like to highlight is that if you do batch processing there's now some nice autofill options that you can use you can also use some nice logic for input layer options like filtering out invalid geometries and things like that so the batch processing is becoming more and more powerful and easy to use and there's a lot of new processing algorithms there's a nice tool called overlap analysis that you can explore join attributes from nearest and i think two that will get a lot of use are repair shapefile and rename table field obviously there's been a lot of work on bookmarks in recent releases so there's now an algorithm that goes along with that to convert a layer to a bookmark and there's a whole suite of fuzzify raster algorithms and random raster algorithms as well and another one i think will get a lot of use is detect data set changes that lets you compare two data sets and see what the differences are in geometry and attributes between the two and lastly in processing there's a new um ability to run qgis in a command line executable environment without the gui so if the top example is from linux mint the command line is is cutest process and then you can use um commands to get help it's like most other well put together command line environments you can get help for syntax you can see a list of available commands um in the the lower animated gif here is using this um environment in the via the ozgio for windows shell so it's cutest underscore process dash qgis and then i'm running um just a native buffer operation so here i'm getting some of the syntax for the native buffer so i can see how to use it and then i'll run the native buffer on a shape file to buffer it by some distance so this is very new and just came out with 314 pi you can go to the blog post here to read more about it this is a great post that has been put up in the last month or so that documents a lot of how to work with this and no talk about new features in qgis would be complete without talking about the expression engine and we have some nice changes it's now important now it's now possible to import and export user expression so you can save an expression out to a json file and down at the bottom there's a really nice preview of the um the result of that expression that you've entered that you can go through on a feature by feature basis and related to the temporal controller there are new variables tied to that map start time map animation variables so um and there's a lot of other new expressions that i don't have time to to go through so looping back into the temporal controller which again is one of the most exciting ones here we're looking at a map of tropical cyclone origin points and before we get into that as i mentioned there there are variables included with the temporal controller so there's animation start time map start time that you can use to do expression based symbology and use with data to find overrides so here you'll notice as these tropical cyclone points appear they're very large and then they fade out and this was done with an expression using these variables also support for data in the temporal controller runs across all the major data models so you can animate vector data raster data mesh data and wms t data this demo on youtube that nile dawson put together is a really nice thorough introduction to things you can do with the temporal controller so i really recommend you watch that it's not quite a complete surrogate for the time manager plug-in yet but it's getting close one thing you can't do just easily is set up um something like this that has the time display so this is just you can do it uh pretty easily with a trick this is just a point layer that's being labeled with one of the temporal variables to show time across the map and similarly this progress bar is another point that is set up with an ellipse marker that gets wider through time basically so again this is all covered in nile dawson's great video so i'm not going to go through that now but just to show you some of the things that are possible in this environment this is that original mesh data set that i started out with with traces and i use the temporal controller to export all of these still images and then stitch them together in to create a gif animation of the hurricanes going through the the caribbean and in the 3d environment we um have a much more intuitive way to navigate now there is this navigation panel that you can open up and the keyboard shortcuts are still there but i think most would find this is a much easier way to navigate your way around a 3d scene and so that's a really nice new feature and also with every new release of cue just you get more and more options in the 3d configuration so again i don't have time to go through all the the little components of that are new in the 3d environment but suffice to say it's getting better and better with each new release so that's my talk i hope we have time for a few questions this is my contact information and i would also like to say since we're getting near the the close of this conference um what our pleasure has been to be on the the planning committee for this there's just been um a handful of us that have volunteered to put this on and it's it's gone um very well i'm really really happy with it and um we also i'm proud to say that we had no sponsors for this conference we just did this free on on a volunteer basis so i want to encourage people to think about donating to qgis.org as we've been mentioning throughout the conference it would be great if we could get some contributions to qgis out of this and with that i would be happy to take any questions all right kurt that was that was wonderful um a lot of great features tons of stuff that i that i that i didn't even know about um i think i can speak for everybody who's listening like the reselect tool uh mind equal blown not really a question more of a comment there um if you had more time what other features do you think you'd include in this uh presentation well i actually did cover a couple things that i had to cut out there are some gui changes just like the news feed when you open up qgis that allows qgis.org to be able to you know give us information that's really nice but beyond that let's see i didn't cover any of the editing functionality in here there's now i know a floating widget that allows you to display angle and distance settings there's support for curved geometries when you're tracing now some things like that awesome yep um even like some nitty gritty things like projections um people may notice now when you install qgis you also are prompted to install the uh grid files for projections because now qgis is relying on proj to handle all the transformations and so there's a lot of uh deep things like that as well oh it's great no so i have a question about uh vector tiles so when you load vector tiles into qjs i haven't played around with it enough can you actually run any analysis on that uh no you can use the identify tool against them but but not not really they're mainly going to serve as a base map okay perfect so i have a question from somebody on on youtube uh within new features is there a tool to create project reports oh yeah well there is project reports it's kind of you know tied to the atlas so you can go into the print composer and start a project report and set up individual pages with headers and all of that it's a pretty robust environment amazing um and and last one is is it possible to scale the size of labels inside polygons depending on their area so smaller ones will be obviously different uh yeah i don't know if there's a data defined override to do that um i don't think so but one one nice new labeling feature that is related to that is it's now possible to specify that you want polygon labels to appear outside the the polygon in those cases right interesting yeah all right so one bonus question here so looking at the road map qgis current road map is there anything that's exciting you about what's coming out in the future yeah i don't really have the crystal ball um but i i think that um i do a lot of cartography and i think the the cartographic options are just um entering the stratosphere now and i expect that can to continue and uh so i look forward to what we're able to do cartographically and cue just going forward i think it's going to get better and better that's great thanks so much kurt for your time by kurt's books they're wonderful

Channel: QGIS North America

Views: 2,328

Keywords:

Id: bwKxCdAOPjU

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020