Blog – North Road

Posted on November 7, 20233D Tiles, Integrations, QGIS

QGIS 3D Tiles – thanks to Cesium Ecosystem Grant!

We’ve recently had the opportunity to implement a very exciting feature in QGIS 3.34 — the ability to load and view 3D content in the “Cesium 3D Tiles” format! This was a joint project with our (very talented!) partners at Lutra Consulting, and was made possible thanks to a generous ecosystem grant from the Cesium project. Before we dive into all the details, let’s take a quick guided tour showcasing how Cesium 3D Tiles work inside QGIS: What are 3D tiles? Cesium 3D Tiles are an OGC standard data format where the content from a 3D scene is split up into multiple individual tiles. You can think of them a little like a 3D version of the vector tile format […]

Posted on November 3, 2023Conferences

FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2023 Auckland round up

Recently, we had the pleasure of helping organise the FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2023 conference in Auckland. It was a fantastic week and felt like a worthy return to pre-covid events full of great presentations, catching up with old friends, making new ones, and of course – delicious food! The venue, Auckland University of Technology, put on a really professional event with catering, venue spaces and their Audio Visual operations. Auckland gave us great weather, and great venues to enjoy each others company in. We were blown away with the variety of presentations and the talent our Oceania region holds. We got to meet some of our clients in person including Koordinates, A.B. Heritage and Soar, which we loved, plus we […]

Posted on October 11, 2023Integrations, QGIS, Web Mapping

QGIS Add to Felt Plugin – Phase 2

We have been continuing our work with the Flagship sponsor of QGIS – Felt to develop their QGIS Plugin – Add to Felt that makes it even easier to share your maps and data on the web. What is the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin? The ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin is a powerful tool that empowers users to export their QGIS projects and layers directly to a Felt web map. This update introduces two fantastic features: Single Layer Sharing: You can now share a single layer from your QGIS project to a Felt map. This means you have greater control over which specific data layers to share, allowing you to tailor your map precisely to your audience’s needs. Map […]

Posted on August 24, 2023August 25, 2023Integrations, Partners, QGIS

Soar.Earth Digital Atlas QGIS Plugin

Growing up, I would spend hours lost in National Geographic maps. The feeling of discovering new regions and new ways to view the world was addictive! It’s this same feeling of discovery and exploration which has made me super excited about Soar’s Digital Atlas. Soar is the brainchild of Australian, Amir Farhand, and is fuelled by the talents of staff located across the globe to build a comprehensive digital atlas of the world’s maps and images. Soar has been designed to be an easy to use, expansive collection of diverse maps from all over the Earth. A great aspect of Soar is that it has implemented Strong Community Guidelines and moderation to ensure the maps are fit for purpose. Recently, […]

Posted on June 23, 2023July 13, 2023Partners, QGIS

‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin

The gift economy of Open Source is community driven and filled by folks with ideas that just go for it! We at North Road are blessed that we get to join these creatives on their journey in order to get their products to you. Recently, the first QGIS flagship sponsor, Felt, engaged us to further strengthen their support for the up to 600,000 daily QGIS users to integrate their workflows between QGIS and Felt. The result is the “Add to Felt” QGIS Plugin, which makes it super-simple to publish your QGIS maps to the Felt platform. To get started, install the Add to Felt Plugin from the QGIS Plugin manager. If you don’t have a free Felt account, you’ll need to […]

3D Tiles Cesium integration ecosystem diagram

Posted on June 1, 2023June 1, 20231 Comment3D Tiles, Core Feature Development, Integrations, Partners, QGIS

Cesium Ecosystem Grant Win for QGIS 3D Tiles!

Success! Lutra and North Road have been rewarded a Cesium Ecosystem Grant to provide access to 3D tiles within QGIS. We will be creating the ability for users to visualise 3D Tiles in QGIS alongside other standard geospatial sources in both 3D and 2D map views. We are very excited about it, but to be included in the first cohort of awardees is also an added honour! We share this distinction with 3 other recipients: Peter Kimberley, Gradata Systems Pty Ltd, Canberra, Australia Vietnam War Missing in Action (MIA) Support HIdenori Watanave, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, Digital Archives of War and Disasters Ethan Berg, Agora World, Philadelphia, PA, USA, GeoForAll: Simplifying 3D Geospatial Metaverse Creation The opportunity was […]

Posted on May 31, 2023QGIS, SLYR

SLYR Update — June 2023

Welcome back, SLYR enthusiasts! We’re thrilled to share the latest updates and enhancements for our SLYR ESRI to QGIS Compatibility Suite that will dramatically streamline the use of ESRI documents within QGIS (and vice versa!). Our team has been hard at work, expanding the capabilities of SLYR to ensure seamless compatibility between the latest QGIS and ArcGIS releases. We’ve also got some exciting news for users of the Community Edition of SLYR! Let’s dive right in and explore the exciting new features that have been added to SLYR since our previous update… Converting Raster Layers in Geodatabases We’re pleased to announce that SLYR now offers support for converting raster layers within Geodatabases. With this update, users can effortlessly migrate their […]

Posted on November 24, 2022November 25, 2022QGIS

QGIS 3.28 improvements for working with ESRI formats and services

The QGIS 3.28 release is an extremely exciting release for all users who work in mixed software workplaces, or who need to work alongside users of ESRI software. In this post we’ll be giving an overview of all the new tools and features introduced in 3.28 which together result in a dramatic improvement in the workflows and capabilities in working with ESRI based formats and services. Read on for the full details…! Before we begin, we’d like to credit the following organisations for helping fund these developments in QGIS 3.28: Naturstyrelsen, Denmark Provincie Gelderland, Netherlands Uppsala Universitet, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History Gemeente Amsterdam Provincie Zuid-Holland, Netherlands FileGeodatabase (GDB) related improvements The headline item here is that QGIS 3.28 […]

Posted on November 4, 2022QGIS, SLYR

SLYR Update — November 2022

Our SLYR tool is the complete solution for full compatibility between ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. It offers a powerful suite of conversion tools for opening ESRI projects, styles and other documents directly within QGIS, and for exporting QGIS documents for use in ESRI software. A lot has changed since our last SLYR product update post, and we’ve tons of very exciting improvements and news to share with you all! In this update we’ll explore some of the new tools we’ve added to SLYR, and discuss how these tools have drastically improved the capacity for users to migrate projects from the ESRI world to the open-source world (and vice versa). ArcGIS Pro support The headline item here is that SLYR […]

Posted on November 4, 2022November 16, 2023Cartography, QGIS

Creating circular insets and other fun QGIS layout tricks

Thanks to the recent popularity of the “30 Day Map Challenge“, the month of November has become synonymous with beautiful maps and cartography. During this November we’ll be sharing a bunch of tips and tricks which utilise some advanced QGIS functionality to help create beautiful maps. One technique which can dramatically improve the appearance of maps is to swap out rectangular inset maps for more organic shapes, such as circles or ovals. Back in 2020, we had the opportunity to add support for directly creating circular insets in QGIS Print Layouts (thanks to sponsorship from the City of Canning, Australia!). While this functionality makes it easy to create non-rectangular inset maps the steps, many QGIS users may not be aware […]