Using the Animation Workbench

In this section, we describe the general workflow for using the Animation Workbench.

Process Overview

1. Create a QGIS project!
2. Identify features that will be animated.
3. Use the QGIS Expressions system with the variables introduced by the Animation Workbench to define behaviours of your symbols during flight and hover modes of your animation.
4. Open the Animation Workbench and configure your animation, choosing between the different modes and options.
5. Render your animation!

More in Depth Process

1. Create a QGIS Project   Open QGIS and click on Project ➔ New

 

Add new layers to your project

A simple way to add a base layer is to type "world" (1) into the coordinate textbox

Style the layers you've added to make your project look a bit better. Select the layer (2) you want to style and in the Layer Styling toolbar (3), style the layer to look appealing to you.

 

2. Identify features that will be animated.  

Pick the layer (or layers) that you want to animate. Then either find or create the animation for the layer. Make sure you have all the correct attribution for any animations you use. Below is an example of an animation split into its frames.

3. Use the QGIS Expressions system with the variables introduced by the Animation Workbench to define behaviours of your symbols during flight and hover modes of your animation.  

Select the layer you want to animate and open the Layer Styling toolbar.

If you are using QGIS 3.26 you can simply use the new animated point symbol, or if you're using an older version of QGIS 3.x follow the instructions below.

The layer should be a Raster Image Marker. Once you have selected the image you want to use click on the QGIS Expressions dropdown menu (4) and click on Edit (5).

  Use the Code Snippets Section for more in depth help. The example below works with the bird animation from earlier

   @project_home
   ||
   '/bird/bird_00'
   || 
   lpad(to_string(@frame_number % 9), 2, '0')
   || 
   '.png'

1. Open the Animation Workbench and configure your animation, choosing between the different modes and options.  

Open the Workbench by clicking the Animation Workbench (6) icon in the Plugin Toolbar.

 

Configure the settings for your animation. The screenshot below is configured for the example presented in this section. The Animation Layer is selected as route (7) because that is the path the animation will fly along, the Zoom Range (8) was selected from the Map Canvas Extent, and the Frame rate per second (9) was set to 9 to match the bird animation.

 

Set your desired Output Options (10) Select a location for your output (11).

 

Refer to the Workbench User Interface Section for more information about what various settings and buttons accomplish.

2. Render your animation!   Click Run and render your output. The output below is the output from the example.