Cartography Inspirationator John Nelson made an awesome map of hurricanes and later posted detailed how-tos for ArcMap and recently ArcGIS Pro. Right after his first post I started rebuilding it in QGIS using draw effects for adding the colored outer glow instead of using image icons, adding a vignette on-the-fly and adjusting the background raster’s saturation on the fly. All in all, less manual work, more dynamic processing in QGIS. I quickly got frustrated though and gave up.

More than a year later (triggered by the new ArcGIS Pro how-to storymap) I revisited my draft and finished it. So here is the QGIS version. As no-one is paying me to write this, I currently cannot be arsed to make it as fancy as John’s posts. Sorry! :)

This project shows QGIS’ strength in features and struggle with performance. Also some bugs. I stopped working on this once I liked the looks. It is not optimized in any way. So this is just how I ended up doing it. You could do much better. I like proof of concepts. And short sentences.

Data sources (I host a lightning-fast mirror of Natural Earth at https://www.datenatlas.de/geodata/public/sources/www.naturalearthdata.com/ if downloads are 404 again…):

• NOAA: Allstorms.ibtracs_all_points.v03r09.shp
• Natural Earth: ne_110m_coastline.shp
• Natural Earth: ne_110m_graticules_20.shp
• Natural Earth: NE2_LR_LC_SR_W_DR.tif

That’s right, nothing but pure, unaltered geodata!

1. Load the NE2_LR_LC_SR_W_DR.tif raster. Lower the saturation to about -50.
2. Set your project’s projection to EPSG:3031 so that you get a nice polar viewpoint.
3. Rotate the canvas by 150° because that’s what John did.
4. Load the graticules. Use a rule-based style for ‘"direction" = 'W' or "direction" = 'E' or "direction" is NULL‘ so that you get all longitudes but only the equator from the latitudes. Set the layer transparency to 60 or something like that.
5. Load the coastline.
6. Add a vignette using this trick.
7. Load the Allstorms.ibtracs_all_points.v03r09.shp Shapefile and then:
1. Create a rule-based style with rules for the storm categories. I think I used this.
2. Use white markers without outlines. Set their sizes using an expression on the wind speed or like me, manually to e.g. 0.7, 0.8, 1, 1, 1.6, 2 millimeters. This is something to play around with until it looks good.
3. I used transparency for the markers of the lowest classes, 85% and 70%, the others are not transparent. This is something to play around with until it looks good. If I recall correctly I used transparency on the layer level here to keep the bubbly looks.
4. By now you should be quite annoyed at how slow the rendering process is. >:) But wait, it gets much worse! :o)
5. For each of the classes, enable draw effects on the markers.
6. Set the source to use Addition blend mode. Set the source to be somewhat transparent, I used 50%, 80%, 80%, 50%, 40%, 0%. This is something to play around with until it looks good.
7. Add outer glow and choose an appropriate color (Hint: Use a lot of saturation). Then play around with the spread, blur radius and transparency until it looks good. For some reason I ended up using 1mm/3/95%, 1mm/4/95%, 1mm/3/80%, 1.2mm/4/50%, 1.5mm/4/40%, 3mm/1/50%. Only now that I post this I realise how weirdly inconsistent this is and a quick test shows how irrelevant the blur radius changes are (except for the highest class). Oh well. It’s not fun to interate if you have to click so much and rendering that 40-50 seconds…
8. That’s it! Done!

This was both fun and incredibly annoying. QGIS has the features but lacks in speed for this funky project (no wonder, blending 300,000 glowing points is not that nice). Here is a realtime video of how it rendered on my machine (take away some seconds from manually enabling the layers after another):

PS: Oh god this WordPress style sucks…

The other day I was working on visualisation of some intermediate research stuff and ended up with something looking like a bouquet of flowers.

Twitter liked it so here is a how-to.

1. Have some lines that meet in a shared point. They should have a shared ID per group (in my case they were MultiLineStrings).
2. Color them per ID.
3. Turn the background black.
4. Use an Arrow style for the lines. Set the Head thickness to half the Arrow width. Set the Head length to whatever you consider fancy.
5. Remove the Outline (set No Pen).
6. Set the Feature blending mode to Multiply (or to Screen or Dodge or Addition if you prefer fireworks to flowers).
7. Set an appropriate color scheme. For flowers I think RdYlGn works great (that’s how I realised what my random tinkering had lead to) or PiYg or simply Spectral, for fireworks random colors.

Following Doing things to the whole map canvas in QGIS and adding some blending to the mix (he-he), I ended up with this map. Nothing you could not do with simple post-processing in a raster image editor or even QGIS’ map composer I guess.

It was simply the result of playing around, there probably is a faster or more efficient way.

First give your geometries some fancy texture with Raster image fill (left). Then constrict its display to just some blurry borders by using a grey fill, Blur draw effect with maximum strength and the Dodge Layer blending mode (right).

You could probably skip the texture for the geometry but I did not manage to get a similarly nice effect with a Simple fill.

Use the trick from Doing things to the whole map canvas in QGIS to fill your canvas with a polygon and give that a nice texture as well. Use Multiply as Layer blending mode and get social media hype for that unbelievable stain can you believe it looks like that???

From the same session comes this beauty (mostly due to Tom Patterson’s shading of course ;) ):

Due to a minor bug in QGIS you need a very recent testing build. 2.16.3 is not recent enough but 2.16.4 would be.

For cool tricks like vignetting or other eye candy, having a geometry that spans the whole map canvas in QGIS can be very useful.

Using the @map_* Variables available in expressions in combination with a Geometry generator style allows you to do this.

@map_extent_center returns a Point geometry of the current map canvas center, with x(@map_extent_center) and y(@map_extent_center) you get the x and y coordinates of it in the current CRS.
@map_extent_width and @map_extent_height return the width respectively height of the map canvas in CRS units.

Our goal is to create a polygon that exactly matches the map canvas extents. Some simple math gets you there.

First create Points for each of the corners by alternating the x+/-width and y+/-height. Then create a Line from all of them (the last point does not need to be the first again, make_polygon does that for you). And use the line as outer ring for a Polygon.

make_polygon(
 make_line(
  make_point(x(@map_extent_center)-@map_extent_width/2, y(@map_extent_center)-@map_extent_height/2),
  make_point(x(@map_extent_center)+@map_extent_width/2, y(@map_extent_center)-@map_extent_height/2),
  make_point(x(@map_extent_center)+@map_extent_width/2, y(@map_extent_center)+@map_extent_height/2),
  make_point(x(@map_extent_center)-@map_extent_width/2, y(@map_extent_center)+@map_extent_height/2)
 )
)

To actually see this, you need to use the style on a layer with at least one feature that is always visible where you want to focus your map canvas. Just make a polygon layer with one polygon that encloses the whole area. The layer must be in the same CRS as the project I think.

You now have a Polygon that corresponds with the map canvas. Give it a radial gradient fill with some transparency and party!

All aerial images in the examples are

Lizenz: Datenlizenz Deutschland Namensnennung 2.0
Namensnennung: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Landesbetrieb Geoinformation und Vermessung
http://daten-hamburg.de/geographie_geologie_geobasisdaten/digitale_orthophotos/DOP20/DOP20_HH_fruehjahrsbefliegung_2015.zip

To make sure the feature you want to highlight is in the center, you could use another layer and @map_extent_center.

Yes, this totally is a hack but it’s fun!