1 Points on a Line

Tutorial 1: Point Along A Line

This tutorial introduces the concept of moving a point along a line within your animated map.

1. Download and extract the Required Tutorial Zip Folder  

2. Open the tutorial_1.qgz project file that is in the folder. When you first open it you you see something like this:

 

3. Select the premade line layer (1), and click on the Add Symbol Layer (green plus symbol) button (2) to it.

Change the new Symbol Layer (3) type to marker line and then style it (4) so that it is more visible.

4. Change the Symbol Layer's settings so that the point is only on the first vertex (5) and and not at equidistant intervals.

Change the offset along the line to be Percentage (6).

Click the Dropdown Menu (7) ➔Edit... (8) and then add the following code snippet

    -- Point Along Line Code Snippet
    (@current_hover_frame/@hover_frames) * 100

The snippet tells QGIS how far along the line (as a percentage of the line length) to render the point in each frame.

5. Open the Workbench and select Fixed Extent (9).

Click on Map Canvas Extent (10) and set the the Frames to 300 (11) (for a 10 second output at 30 frames per second).

6. Skip over the Intro, Outro, and Soundtrack tabs. In the Output tab, set the output format (12) and resolution (13), and set the output location's path (14).

7. Click Run and render your output.

After this tutorial you should have a better idea of how to make a point move along a line. An expansion to this example would be to make the moving point a dynamically changing marker (like the markers in tutorial 1). Go have fun!