QGIS _Distance from point to polygon- doubt

Question

I want to calculate the distance between a shp of points and a shp with a few polygons. I am using MMQGIS (Hub distances), a UTM coordinate system, and everything works fine, but I think it is giving me the distance from each point to the center of each polygon and, since the shp of the polygon represents water courses, I would like to obtain the distance of each point to the "surface" of the polygon.

Because there are points very close to the water but the distance I obtain is very far way.

Here:

The yellow polygon represents almost the whole river, and there are points very cloe to the river but the distance I obtain is, for instance, 5 km.

How do I do solve this?

Answer 1

You are correct in that it calculates the distance between your points to the centroid of polygons/lines. You could:

1. Convert your polygon to lines (Vector > Geometry Tools > Polygons to Lines)
2. Convert your lines to points (Processing Toolbox > SAGA > Shapes - Points > Convert Lines to Points)
3. Then run the Hub distances using your main points layer and the newly converted points layer

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Or you could try using the GRASS tool v.distance (Processing Toolbox > GRASS commands > Vector > v.distance)