LIDAR in QGIS 3.34

Dec 12, 2023 | Lidar, QGIS

I’m old. If you look at my past mapping history I was helping create DEMs (or DTM’s if you will) with Photogrammetry folk. It involved a lot of Aerial Photography and control and weeks. Then LIDAR hits. TN has an abundance of LIDAR and I rarely have any jobs revolving around it. It is fun to play with and play I do.

So with 3.34 you have PDAL Wrench. I think PDAL wrench came out in 3.32. You can drop a Las file into QGIS and start “doing things”.

You drop LIDAR in and you see it is initially displayed with it’s classification. The TN LIDAR data is pretty boring. Good but boring from a symbolization standpoint.

Let’s pull out the Ground:

So with the filter Processing tool I can take my original 63 million point LAS file and take it down to 22 million points.

If I export this to raster and then use GDAL’s Fill NoData processing tool……

Contours, slopes, aspect, hillshades can happen now. TN has a base DEM you can use but I this it’s pretty nice I can do this in like 4 minutes and make my own. If I had a drone I could use PDAL to derive ground and then start working my way up from there.

Oh yeah….Height Above Ground?

Good things from the QGIS community. It’s the end of the year – You should toss them a donation for all the cool things they were accomplished 2023 and all the cool things in 2024.

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