Animating a layer

QGIS increasingly supports cartographic visualizations that go beyond GIS analysis. Many of these visualizations are provided by plugins, such as the animation feature of the mmqgis plugin. You can animate lines and points to bring your thematic map to life. In this example, we'll animate hub lines generated from the nearest neighbor analysis of UFO sightings in major cities. This data is the output from the Chapter 8, QGIS Workflows, Performing nearest neighbor analysis recipe.

Getting ready

You will need to make sure you have the mmqgis plugin installed via the QGIS plugin manager. Once installed, the plugin will show up as its own menu.

Unzip the following two zipped datasets and extract them to a directory named ufo in your qgis_data directory:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/ufo.zip

You can download the second dataset here:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/alien_invasion.zip

You will need to create...