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Comment by alannala | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone seen any nice examples of work done with the open LiDAR data?

I downloaded all the 1m dsm composite data from the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales and used C#, System.Drawing.Graphics and hefty server from AWS EC2 to render 2 million png files, which I then moved onto a Scaleway C1 bare-metal ARM server, to produce this slippy lidar map of England and Wales: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map

This is awesome thanks for sharing

Incredible and you can even see ripples on the sea. I was wondering (as I live by the coast) what the deal was with the sea but I see that because they did multiple passes over the area, the tide is at different heights.

Wow! A heartfelt thank you for this massive effort. Amazing work mate. Cheers!

This is super cool, nice one!

3D printed model of London. http://www.aeracode.org/2016/5/16/hello-london-rising/

That is very cool. I could see lots of people would want one of those on their wall.

Pretty cool. Is there a way a non coder like me could stick in a postcode and get out a 3d file to take for printing?

Finding Digital Surface Models by area (if they exist for the relevant region) on the UK government website isn't too difficult https://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/survey/index.jsp#/survey

The creator uploaded the convert-to-3D program, so once you've found the files it should be possible to turn them into 3D files provide you're comfortable running stuff from the command line and following his advice on parameters. https://github.com/andrewgodwin/lidartile

I haven't tried it yet though - it's on the to do list!

Thanks! Seems very doable...

That's very nice!

I started doing something similar when the Welsh LiDAR data was released ( details in https://theretiredengineer.wordpress.com/category/lidar/ ). I had written some code to manipulate PLY files when I was trying to create 3D models of standing stones using photogrammetry. It was then fairly easy to modify that code to create PLY models using the LiDAR data. However I found two problems for the area that I was interested in ( parts of south west Wales )

  1. The LiDAR data coverage was a bit patchy
  2. There were gaps in the data files which resulted in holes in the model

There was nothing I could do about #1 but it should be fairly easy to fix #2. The other option would be to use a GIS of some sort to process the data.

A friend of mine made https://github.com/catenoid/Shadow-Map

Uses UK LIDAR data to show shadow maps. This can be used to show urban areas which are permanently in shadow. Or just as a cool way to map the country.

There's been some work to use it to add metadata to OpenStreetMap:

http://chris-osm.blogspot.com/2015/09/extracting-building-he...

If you're looking for just general examples and inspiration for things that can be done with LIDAR data, the LAStools blog [1] has a lot of em. Their mailing list is interesting as well.

I've been using LIDAR data for doing canopy height modeling, and screening remote areas for possible exceptional/champion trees prior to checking it out in person.

Haven't put anything online yet because I'm very new to GIS and this sort of thing, and am still getting over the horror of what it takes to build a functioning workspace and data pipeline.

("Just take this TIFF and convert it to a CSV" is a phrase I never thought would make sense, but here it does.)

[1] https://rapidlasso.com/blog/

What software are you using? I have found PDAL[0] to be very simple to run with docker, though building from source is a bit consuming, especially as you reach out for more plugins you didn't realize you wanted initially.

PDAL is my current software crush.

[0]http://pdal.io

I was really pleasantly surprised with LAStools. It's mostly closed source, Windows only, and the free version is subtly crippled - but it works really well.

Getting it running under Wine was dead-simple. There's a significant community around it, and the author fights for open formats.

Checking out PDAL is on my todo list for sure.

Was very helpful in creating a point cloud viewer. Not uk but US open lidar data:

- http://potree.org/potree/examples/ca13.html

- http://potree.org/potree/examples/showcase/lake_tahoe.html

Mapbox has a tutorial https://blog.mapbox.com/add-lidar-to-mapbox-43f7e3912424 it uses OSS tools and you can host results locally, own server or on Mapbox.

Anything in particular you want to see?

Wasn't really after anything specific, just some a few interesting things thrown together. Checked back today and there are some good posts above!

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