We make 3D Maps of American Landscapes in bronze.
We take Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, do light transformations in QGIS and convert it to an .STL file before additional 3D modeling.
Our latest project was a hairy one doing Oahu (https://terramano.co/blogs/product/oahu-bronze-3d-map)
What resolution? Totally depends on the area the customer would like to cover. If it’s their ranch or property, we usually need 1-meter. If it’s a mountain range than 30-Meter works.
It mainly depends on the resolution limit for 3D printing. So it also depends on the size of the model they want.
Unfortunately not all areas are covered with high res
https://www.usgs.gov/the-national-map-data-delivery/gis-data...
They have full US coverage and many infill sets at higher resolutions.
They have 1 metre DEMs ( ~ one elevation per three foot x three foot square )
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/items?q=&filter=tags=Dig...
and more if you get to know their community and products (they are a firehose of likely more data than many can afford to reliably store).
(Near) global coverage, 90m resolution. Easy to fetch tiles with a script.
If you have weird artifacts, I'm guessing that is due to the underlying data vs QGIS itself. Have you looked at their documentation (https://demto3d.com/en/)?
I outline how the whole process works here https://www.gregkamradt.com/gregkamradt/2020/2/29/manufactur...
You have fewer products for sale than I was expecting.
I live in NE Los Angeles, which has the Verdugo and San Gabriel mtns, plus Mt Washington and other modest peaks - I think it would look great in this style. Especially because all the development would be excluded.
For every new location you do the process looks like: 1. Get the data and prep it for print (fixed) 2. 3D print it (fixed) 3. Rubber Mold (fixed) 4. Wax Model (variable) 5. Bronze (variable)
Steps 1-3 are 40-60% of the costs. So I haven't put the money out of pocket yet to put up new locations. I've let customer's ask first and then do them.
Surprisingly, most of our orders have been custom
Here's my info packet on the custom process https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IkiHG_Z5JS03mWYHv-KNAhi8...
Anyway they look beautiful.
Do you have a video link of what you're referring to?
I once tried to use the molds to make chocolate representations of the mountains ha! I learned the hard way that tempering is difficult for a novice
One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.
I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-watering hourly rates.
At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong. They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.
^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features in as much detail as the land typically gets
I think Esri is (and has been) in a very similar position to Microsoft's in the late 1990s -- having achieved market dominance, they feel like open source software is the biggest threat to their business. But I think the presence of QGIS is creating competition, which is nothing but good for the industry.
(I worked as a developer for Esri for 15 years)
I've had difficulty making it work for production services (especially extensions). Ultimately moved more towards the Python/OSM stack.
Such a fun space.
I think a simplified GIS program with stripped-down functionality and an intuitive UI could be a big hit. Think of SketchUp versus SolidWorks or ProE.
Here's a couple maps that I have made about the Honoulu marathon that I wouldn't have made in a more complex/time-intensive piece/powerful piece of software: - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-TCg9C... - https://felt.com/map/UNOFFICIAL-Honolulu-Marathon-2022-Road-...
Or to put it another way, what's the workflow that a simpler, more opinionated interface would solve, and what features could or would you sacrifice for it?
You likely either: - needed to export an image of the data (raster); - needed to digitise the data within; - needed to extract the vector data first from the pdf and work out how to deal with it.
Opening a pdf without appropriate data structures into a gis software package is akin to taking a picture of a billboard that has a printed image of a map on it and then expecting to be able to do anything with that picture. The pdf is a bit better, but not by much unless it began life as a georeferenced pdf with vector data maintained.
These two already dominate more casual mapping
QGIS is great software, and I respect what they're doing.
ArcGIS Online is a pretty great option and the Living Atlas [1] makes it really easy to consume a lot of data (a bunch of NASA datasets were recently added) and make cool maps. ArcGIS Online ends up being almost like Dropbox for geographic data, but instead of just files you can get full services, and a suite of apps for taking advantage of the services. That includes taking maps offline, making field edits, and syncing them (although that starts to cost money).
You can try the map tool without signing in, and that gives you a good idea of what you can do in the browser (custom popups, charts, tables, filtering, symbology, clustering, cartographic blending, etc). https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=dece...
The personal use subscription is $100/year and includes the full desktop software and cloud storage. [2]
[1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/browse/#d=2 [2] https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-for-person...
edit: forgot to mention there is a great developer story: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/
ArcGIS then proceeds to apply symbology one layer at a time, taking between 30 to 75 seconds per layer to apply it.
In QGIS, right click in layer, copy symbology, select other layers right click, paste symbology. Done in 3 seconds.
And like that I could be hours and hours talking about similar experiences.
ArcGIS might be much more powerful, but honestly it isn't worth spending 45 minutes to what in QGIS can be done in 5 minutes.
Are there any plans for a native macOS version? For someone that wants to learn more about GIS in general, does the web version have what is needed?
In my personal experience with using ArcGIS, I have only needed Pro in two situations. The first is when I'm trying to georeference a raster (I just bought one from SkyFi). The second is when I've bought a tutorial book that is based around ArcGIS Pro (e.g. Modern Policing Using ArcGIS Pro).
If you want to learn ArcGIS and not rely on Pro, you can visit the learn site and filter to just ArcGIS Online: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol
I won't say more, but I have personally been impressed by the rate of improvement in feature capability in ArcGIS Online. I am not aware of any plans to move Pro to macOS, I feel your pain there.
This post doesn’t mention ArcGIS at all, except for as a data source that your county government probably uses.
I remember when I didn’t know about ArcGIS and thought it was cool to build apps that put points on MapBox maps - which I later found out is a waste of time, because ArcGIS already does that job well.
I think this post leaves people with the impression that GIS is niche, or difficult, or not accessible to lay users. My personal opinion is that recent advancements in Web GIS make the field about as accessible to people as things like word processing, while QGIS is stuck in the ArcMap days, catering exclusively to trained GIS professionals.
It is absolutely meaningful to point out that you don’t need to be a trained data engineer to do this kind of work, and that this 4,000 word journey could have been done in 10 minutes of clicking around user-friendly software.
One thing that's frustrated me, and I want to make sure it isn't a misconfiguration on my end, is that QGIS feels really slow. For example, I have a 150MB geojson file which has 300,000 points with associated metadata. Even when I'm zoomed in such that I can only see a few thousand points at a time, if I pan the map over by 50% it takes at least 10 seconds before it loads in the new points. Many long operations seem to take place synchronously on the UI thread, so the whole app is unresponsive while they take place. Clicking the drop down arrow on a PostGIS Schema to view the tables spins for several minutes. No other Postgres tool I have takes that long, so it's not the database. The PostGIS import/export tools were also extremely slow and didn't have progress bars. I'm using 3.24 currently. I don't want to rag on it too hard, but it's really hampered my enthusiasm for working with maps and GIS.
GeoJSON is unfortunately one of the worst formats to keep the data you are using in. Its great for transport and interoperability, but there is no way to index the data in the format. It doesn't matter if you are only drawing a few thousand points, it is still looking through all of them to see which ones to draw.
GIS is awesome, and don't let one tool get you down. If its something interesting to you, there is a lot more to it than just QGIS. Part of my pain with QGIS is because I rarely ever use it so I forget what I learned last time. I spend most of my time purely in python, and don't really need to.
Edit: agreed on the slowness of DB connections, I've found that too, including for relatively small locally-hosted DBs.
I assumed that since geojson is completely unsuitable for querying directly, it would load the whole thing into a native in-memory format, but perhaps not.
I wanted to see exactly how bad it is with a largeish datasets, so I exported the New Zealand address dataset[1] with ~2.5M points as a geopackage (750MB) QGIS loads this fine its a little slow when viewing the entire country but when zoomed into city level it is almost instant to pan around.
Using ogr2ogr I converted it to ndgeojson (2.5GB), It crashed my QGIS while trying to load it. Using shuf I created a random 100,000 points geojson (~110MB) it was unbearably slow in QGIS while panning around 5+ seconds.
I currently use and recommend flatgeobuf[2] for most of my working datasets as it is super quick and doesn't need sqlite to read (eg in a browser).
It is also super easy to convert to/from with ogr2ogr
ogr2ogr -f flatgeobuf output.fgb input.geojson
[1] https://data.linz.govt.nz/layer/105689-nz-addresses/data/ [2] https://github.com/flatgeobuf/flatgeobuf
Another reason is that the underlying C++ engine is tied in such way with the fairly-large Python codebase, that it seldom uses all CPU cores. so you have a single process app. Add to this the fact that the GPU is not used extensively and you get one very slow APP.
So, yeah, for datasets larger than 50k points its slow on arbitrary hardware. Some analysis are impossible to run unless you go to PostGIS
To be honest, ESRI is not a company that everyone loves, but they really invest into ArcGIS Pro, even though they also are not there yet. Both QGIS and ESRI shy away from spatial SQL which is like times more effective for spatial analysis.
To be honest, QGIS is quite old-school in design, and the core devs know that it would take enormous effort to implement it from scratch... at least the slow parts. The fact that it works and is open source, does the fundamental things you need does not make it the _top_ software. this "opensource ftw" is really stupid when you have to work with hundreds of layers with hundred Ks of points.
We typically use QGIS as a viewing engine only, if you let postgis do the heavy lifting it's a beautiful setup, especially with a tuned dB and a indexed clustered postgres table
That fixed it, thanks! Looking at the manual, there is a tip that tells you to turn that on, otherwise it will read the entire table to characterize the geometries... It's a bit mad that the default behavior has it querying potentially gigabytes of information across the network every time you open the app and click a dropdown, with no progress bar. But it's definitely the type of app where you need to read the manual, and it says so right there.
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As far as I can tell, QGIS has no particular understanding of either a coordinate relative to the (moving!) crust or of a coordinate in space-time that can be projected to space at future or past times. Surely this should be a thing!
I found HTDP, a web tool that can shift coordinates forward and back in time:
https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml
And I found this discussion:
https://www.gpsworld.com/the-effects-of-tectonic-plate-movem...
But I haven’t found anything easy to use.
(I have an RTK-capable GPS and NTRIP data via UNAVCO from a nearby CORS station. I was hoping that storing position relative to such-and-such CORS station as it was on such—and-such date would be straightforwardly doable in QGIS.)
I know that the coordinate systems get revised every few years. In Australia we used to use AGD83 then it was revised to GDA94 and more recently to GDA2020 — and this was to account for tectonic shifts. And there’s calculations for transforming from one to the other.
That’s the only clues I have on that side of things and I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve known.
Perhaps that would work for you. because while the plate is shifting with respect to the globe, everything on that plate will maintain the same relative position.
I set up my own NTRIP base station at a fixed point in the middle of my roof with a hefty bracket, did a PPP survey to determine its location once, and am considering everything relative to that. This spring when I'm back at the surveying, I'll likely do another PPP run and make sure it hasn't moved too much. If it has, I guess I'll have to figure out how to reconcile that. From what I've gathered, I don't think this is too far off from how real surveying works.
I didn't see much reason to use a different unit than degrees. Although while I haven't gotten super in depth learning QGIS, it feels like there's an impedance mismatch in that it seems to be a 2D program that treats degrees as linear units (and then applies a fudge factor to degrees longitude), rather than a native 3D program. So I'm doing all of my collection, point storage, and calculation with scripts outside of QGIS, and then only pushing the cooked results to QGIS for visualization.
I use it daily, and frequently, for all sorts of work building a location API SaaS company. It's a sterling success of open source, on par with as impactful as Linux, for the geospatial world (IMO).
I tried to perform what I thought were basic tasks of drawing a few line segments and measuring geodesic distances between two points, but I needed a janky plugin for the former and never figured out how to do the latter.
I really do want to learn it however, since it's a lot easier sometimes to work interactively than doing everything in Python code, and I know QGIS is supposed to be a very powerful tool in general.
- The QGIS Training Manual is good. Not great; don't be afraid to go out of order after the first few modules to get to parts useful to you, because the module organization after "Creating Vector Data" stops being terribly linear. https://docs.qgis.org/3.22/en/docs/training_manual/index.htm...
- https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/ is more project- and task-oriented, and where I learned georeferencing and digitizing (drawing over raster maps)
- If you prefer video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHolzMgaqwE is geared more toward using third-party data
EDIT: There's also this UCDavis workshop for people with no mapping experience. Haven't used it but at a glance it looks pretty comprehensive. https://github.com/ucdavisdatalab/Intro-to-Desktop-GIS-with-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAcZUPSmqDE
That being said, as I've outlined in the article, I certainly haven't properly learned it...
But having dabbled in Python/Folium and the like (most recently did geo vis with Superset for another article), some of the datasets and functionalities were familiar (I also had to do point-in-polygon problems in Python, way back when, so maybe that mental scar helped :) ). I found random blog articles and stackexchange posts for specific questions I got stuck on the most helpful.
For instance, I have this link saved: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/421467/not-geotagged... , which got me down the rabbit hole of "Oh, you can make a style a function of other things? You can read EXIF? How neat!" (where I then found some other posts).
What I will say, almost everything online is out of date - the GUI changed frequently, plugins are now native functionalities etc. The HTML tooltip thing I did is also a modification of an older blog article (which I'm afraid I didn't save), whereas the contour line styling I took verbatim from the article I linked in that paragraph.
GIS is a huge space, and you could specialize in one niche for years or go more general, so it's really based on what you want to do.
I'd say there's three or four general areas: mapping & map data (mostly focused on visualization), geocoding & search (focused on helping people find things in natural language, think text -> coordinates, text -> point of interest -> coordinate), routing (focused on the mechanics of getting things from point a to point b efficiently), and finally a huge, diverse bucket of "other location APIs" (anything from geofencing to timezones to ETL specialization).
I'm happy to chat about this. We aren't hiring, but there are lots of companies that are.
Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think.
It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.
Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing.
It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
I see that now, sorry!
Excellent article, by the way, it's very useful to have this kind of writeup.
I suspect it's something to do with the distributed installation, and the amount of the required behaviour that is sitting behind completed specifications. Eventually, it will be cheaper for a user to just pay for development of any remaining features they need than pay for licensing. And, the functionality addition is cumulative - pay once, keep forever.
Where do people with QGIS knowledge hang out (especially devs)?
I'm saddened that complex-number polynomial expansion fell out of vogue and fear that was the last wall that kept the muggles out of hard core map projections.
I'd kill to find a full remote job doing that.
A couple of packages used by qgis worth calling out - postgis which really grew up with qgis, and pdal which is a relatively new but incredible package for working with point cloud data.
Then, about a year ago, after several years away from the scene, I got some mojo back and started investigating modern QGIS. I was very pleasantly surprised, it immediately felt like an upgrade from what I used to use. And also felt like coming home, in that it was obvious and intuitive how to accomplish the standard functions. If someone had put me in (that famous thing) a blindfolded time machine for a zero-year trip, popped me out, put me in front of QGIS and said "Welcome! This is ArcGIS 9.6!", it wouldn't have been at all unbelievable. If you know what I mean.
No it's not perfect. Casually and hastily wing your way around a project, copypasting here and there, setting up all kinds of parameters and advanced display bits&bobs, and - like most complex geospatial software - you'll, once in awhile, find yourself unceremoniously dumped out onto the desktop with a software error. So a highly robust and restore-able workflow is still essential. But regardless it's up there with the very best packages I've ever used.
Importantly, a good deal, though not all, of the infuriatingly frustrating "random esri error for who knows what reason" issues have been resolved, and continue to improve.
The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.
QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.
QGis is great, lots of tools are nice. Generally ESRI sucks up all the oxygen and leaves not enough for innovation and implementations from anyone else. There are a lot of features and capabilities needed in the Geospatial world that do not have reliable, rock-solid open source implementations. (I could’ve provided examples a few years ago but now I’ve forgotten the important details and only have opinions left)
Can you list a few please?
For research you often want to write routines that you can re-run in the future (replicability, reproductibility, etc.) and it's very easy to do so with statistical software (Stata, R, even Py) but with QGIS I just have a README saying "click here, click there, etc.". Tried to wrap everything in a QGIS Python script once, but it was impossible as there was not a one-to-one translation between clicks and code.
QGIS also has server and headless options, plus lots of the QGIS core is importable into python scripts.
Is the author assuming you're either from the US or European if you're reading the blog?
I’m originally from Germany, hence the bias towards readers from Europe. :)
I'd rather use simplified command line things instead.
For example I don't even remember how to generate raster tiles if I want to host my own maps, I don't think openstreetmap distribute the software they use to make their tiles, out they don't really document how to do it.
So like most open source initiatives, it's not all good.
That having been said, why on earth would you want to use a GUI application to generate raster tiles? The only input required is an extent and a zoom level. Use GDAL or any of ten other free and open-source command-line tools readily available.
It sounds like you’re leaving a dismissive drive-by comment rooted largely in your misunderstanding of a large and complex field with use cases which are largely disjoint. Analysts need GUIs and a lot of different analytics tools. People making web maps don’t.
At this point I didn’t even know about QGIS, but I was happy that instead of reinventing the wheel I already had well-defined file formats etc. to work with. QGIS came a little bit later when I had a bunch of data to analyze. My image metadata wasn’t exactly right for QGIS (and couldn’t have been done that way in real-time anyway), but a 3-line shell script using GDAL converted all of my images into something QGIS could load and draw directly overlaid on top of Google Maps. My flight plans were all done in annotated GeoJSON, which QGIS happily loaded as-is and helpfully split it into the layers I had used under the hood as my data encoding. There were a couple of files that were just plain-old CSV, and QGIS happily ingested those and drew them as points and lines and line segments as appropriate.
It’s phenomenally good. Some other people in this discussion have mentioned that the UI is a bit rough and I can’t disagree with that, although I feel the same way about the commercial tools too. It’s a power tool for sure, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out the quirks and build yourself a workflow.
From what I understood, qgis was doing its job properly. It was a neat tool. I guess the whole stack for this use case was just too fragile.
My only complaint about it is that it can be a little bit slow sometimes. It has to redraw everything if you zoom in. That's especially annoying if you're working with data that has millions of multilines or points. But, as a prototyping engine, that's kind of expected and still better than paying for ArcGIS.
But I recently gave QGIS a shot and am very happy with what it can do. And the price is right!