 Hello, in this video we are going to explore how to symbolize points with a high density. We're going to explore different renderers in the Layer Styling panel, and in the end we'll create a heatmap to use data from OpenStreetMap on water tabs in the Netherlands. This video is part of the IHC Delft Summa course creating data visualizations with graphs, maps and animations. You can find the free tutorial also on GIS OpenCourseWare. The link will be provided in the description of this video. Let's first create a nice backdrop. We're going to use the MapTiler plugin. MapTiler provides very nice vector tiles that we can customize in QGIS in terms of styling and labeling. Install the plugin from the Plugins Manager. After installing, you will find the MapTiler section in the Browser panel. Click right and choose Account. It meets an API access key. Use the link to go to the MapTiler web page and create an account or login to an existing account. Then find under the account the API keys and copy your API key. Go back to QGIS and paste your API key and click OK. This API key is now stored for further sessions. Let's explore the basic vector tile. Click right and choose Add as Vector, which means you add it as a vector tile. Some of the styles could not be converted and gives an error, but you can ignore that. Zoom in on the Netherlands. Now expand the basic layer group and you'll find two layers, MapTiler Planet and Background. Click on MapTiler Planet and open the Layer Styling panel to change the styles. Let's switch off all the roads by unchecking the boxes of layers related to roads. You can also click on a style and modify it. Let's go to the Labels tab and remove the label for the country. If we click on the label, then we can also change the settings of the label. You see that vector tiles are really nice and easy way to customize your base maps. You can also change the background layer and it works exactly the same as styling polygons in this case. You can choose another fill color and let's use some green here. There are also other maps that we can add from the MapTiler cloud. Click right on MapTiler in the browser panel and choose Add New Map and go to MapTiler Cloud and we're going to add Dark Matter. Click OK to add the vector tile to our list in the browser panel, click right on it and add it as a vector. Also here ignore the error. We remove the basic layer because we're going to proceed with the Dark Matter layer. Expand the Dark Matter group and choose MapTiler Planet and first we're going to remove all the roads because they are not necessary for our visualization of the water tabs later. Also remove the railways but keep the boundaries and remove the points of the cities. We just want the labels. What's now very ugly are all these labels of the roads so let's go to the labels tab and remove all the labels except for the places. Also remove the label for the country because it's clear that we focus on the Netherlands. You can also change the background here to a gray fill. You can use the slider and choose a 30% gray. Now let's download the point data set that we want to visualize and we're going to use the Quick OSM plugin for that. Search for Quick OSM in the Plugins Manager and install the plugin. You can open the dialog by clicking this icon and there it needs a key and a value and you can find this on this page. I will also put the link in the description of this video and you see that all the attributes they're not really attributes in OpenStreetMap are based on keys and values so we're searching for the one for the water tabs and here we have it. Amenity is the key and drinking water is the value and that will give us all the water tabs as points. So let's fill the dialog of the Quick OSM with the key and the value and at in we can also type the name of a country, a region or a city so we use Netherlands. Make sure that we only select points and because it's quite large for the whole country we increase the timeout to 60 and then we run the query. After a while it's downloaded and it's added here at the wrong place so we choose move to top but it will move it to the top inside the group. We can also move it out of the group and here we see that it has a default styling for some reason in categorized but we're going to play with that. Let's first change the renderer from categorized to single symbol to see all the points and it will use a random color here in my case that's green and you see that that's not a really clear representation there's a lot of overlaps in areas where there's a high density of points. So let's change it to the point displacement renderer. This displaces points that are overlapping and within a certain distance that you specify and you can choose if you want them the points in concentric rings around it or in a grid and you can play with the distance values I change it to 10 and then back to ring then you see how it visualizes the points. That's also not really what we want so let's try another renderer. Let's go to point cluster and the point cluster renderer will cluster points that are within a certain distance and I change it now back to 3 so if they are in a distance of 3 millimeters then it will create a red dot and the ones that are further are the original green dots and we can make visible how many points these red dots contain. We go into the cluster symbol and we add an extra marker and we change that to a font marker so we can add text inside the dots make sure that you choose black for the fill color otherwise you cannot see the text you see it already displayed and then you can go add characters to the data defined override and look there for the variable cluster size and then it will show you the size of the clusters but it's very small so we still need to play with the font size or the marker size and let's change that to 5 and now we see how big these clusters in the red dots are. It's not really a nice representation like this we could still tune it further but still this is not what we need so a better way to visualize high density points or the distribution of the points is using a heat map so I changed now to the heat map render and it by default uses a grayscale ramp so let's change this I changed it to CVDIS and under layer rendering I want to multiply this with the background layer that doesn't give a nice result because the darkness of the background so let's just uncheck the background you could also make it white and then we see the blue from the ramp and we see here the clusters of points highlighted in the heat map in a more yellowish color you can further improve this by removing the land use polygons because the focus is really the heat map and it should be on a quite neutral background map that does not interrupt too much and let's change the projection of this map to the dodge projection accept the transformation settings you can play with the radius if I make it small it will have less areas with yellow if I make it very large larger areas will be covered so I choose here radius of 20 because this gives a nice effect and you can change the rendering quality if you put it at best it will take some time to render but it will have a much higher resolution I'm still not happy with the labels I don't like that they have uppercase so I'm going to edit that for all of them remove the uppercase except for the capital so there may be still too many labels I'm going to remove a few that we don't really need to orient as a user and this is our map you can further improve it by editing the vector tiles symbolization now let's make the layer permanent change the layer name to water taps we'll start rendering again and this is our final result you can of course improve it further especially the labels can be done a bit better but this is essentially how it works to visualize high density points in QJS