1. Introduction

Sometimes a visualization in 3D is clearer to tell your story than a 2D map. A 3D map or animation is often in 2.5D, where the 3D effect is created by shading and perspective, but you don't need special devices to view the 3D map. We'll still refer to that as 3D in this tutorial.

In this tutorial we're going to visualize the distance to rivers with a 3D animation. We'll use the PCRaster Tools plugin in QGIS to calculate the distance to the rivers and we'll use Aerialod to visualize it in 3D.