Site plan and concept diagrams — Recipe (QGIS)
Used in Urban Design Visualisation (Example) (step 3). Applies Visual hierarchy and figure-ground: white buildings, soft shadows, faint contours, and colour only in the design.
Turn the orthophoto off before you export anything.
1. Style the context layers
| Layer | Style |
|---|---|
| Buildings | Fill white, outline black 0.25–0.35 mm. Layer Styling → Draw effects → Drop shadow: grey, offset 2–4 mm, blur 3–5 |
| Ground surfaces | The polygons from Surface partitioning (Recipe - QGIS), one pale fill per class |
| Contours | From the DTM: Raster → Extraction → Contour, interval 0.25–0.5 m. Thin light grey lines (0.1 mm, 40% opacity) |
| Hillshade (optional) | Raster → Analysis → Hillshade, at 10–20% opacity under everything |
| Existing trees | Points with a simple circle or SVG tree symbol, grey-green, with drop shadow |
The drop shadow here is a graphic convention, not a claim about the sun. For sun-correct shadows, see Line drawings and shadow plans (Recipe - Blender).
2. Draw the proposal
Create a GeoPackage 02_qgis/design.gpkg with separate layers for planting, water, paving zones, furniture and new trees. These layers carry the colour, texture and detail: planting in soft greens, water in dark blue, paving as fine patterns.
3. Print layout
- Project → New Print Layout. Page A3 landscape, map at 1:500 (or 1:400 for a close-up).
- Add a north arrow, a scale bar and a few labels in a serif or plain sans font. Leave white space.
- Export as SVG or PDF (Layout → Export as SVG/PDF) and finish in Affinity — textures, people from above, text. See A0 poster layout (Recipe - Affinity).
4. Concept diagrams
Make a copy of the layout. Show the square as one flat light-grey surface with a thick black outline and hide almost everything else. On top, add:
- Zones as transparent colour polygons (30–50% opacity, one colour each)
- Flows and connections as lines with an arrow symbol layer (Symbol layer type → Arrow)
- Three or four diagrams side by side, each making one point