A plugin to enable easy visualisation of vector-based elevation data.
Layers in QGIS can easily be configured to "hint" at the elevation of individual vectors, giving rise to a visually appealing and informative top-down view:
However I found that whilst I could get a good, approximate understanding of the prevailing terrain, it was still not clear what the elevations between any two points might look like "side-on". Elevation Viewer is a plugin to simplify the activity of determining elevations between two points, and rendering of this information as an easy-to-manipulate image.
I originally put Elevation Viewer together when I was getting interested in a local community that are establishing a metropolitan-area-network with the use of highly directional WiFi gear (http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/). I was interested in understanding the terrain cross-section between two radio sites, particularly how good the line-of-sight would be.
Please feel free to leave any feedback (issues, requests for functionality, ...) as issues on github. I'm working through the TODO list below, but I am just as happy to implement functionality that others might find useful.
This plugin is quite new, and there are a lot of things still to do:
- Remove the "units are in meters" assumption - ask the user for unit of measure
- Capturing more than two points
- Display of captured points on the main QGIS display
- And a level of interactivity between the map view and elevation view
- Place start, end point on the elevation view, rather than just showing elevation between first & last elevation vector encountered along the path between start, end points
- Allow the elevation view to use a different scale for the horizontal axis to that of the vertical axis
- Annotate the elevation view with the start, end-points
- Consider the curvature of the earth, when testing for line-of-sight