Marveling at point clouds, MacOs and the evolution of tech...
I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music. Aaron Sorkin
If you teach in any capacity within tech environments you will recognize what I am about to tell you. Part of the job is to make sure you break the code, installation, execution and whatever else you can because you can bet good money that your audience will experience something tweaky for sure — live.
A sucker for a Sisyphean task, once I became independent I worked on MacOs. I blame those giant brick ThinkPads I had to haul around when I worked in Pharma. That meant back in the early days of Tableau I either ran Parallels or partitioned (Bootcamp) my hard-drive into Windows and Mac.
Arguably the waters are smoother for us MacOs devotees in these modern times but occasionally there is a little ripple we need to contend with.
Recently I was watching my friend and colleague Hans demonstrate working with point clouds in QGIS (video below). The stable release version did not show point clouds in the Processing Toolbox so I needed to do a little troubleshooting.
Download QGIS 4 from the repository. Once it downloads and before you open, go to the installation path outlined in video below:
The point cloud tools should now be visible in Processing Toolbox.When you launch QGIS, Point Data Abstraction Library or PDAL will be updated and ready to support your project.
You might notice a lot of hopefully temporary conflicts with plug-ins in the beta version. A quick workaround for adding a base map involves adding XYZ Tiles in the browser window.
For example, I added Google Satellite and other basemaps and then saved to a template.
Create and Use Virtual Point Clouds in QGIS
Tiles from the Netherlands: geotiles.nl is a great resource for learning how to create your virtual point clouds. You can do a little sleuthing and find other resources such as OpenTopography. Find tile(s) within an area of interest and download.
Wait for the Cloud Optimized Point Cloud Specification (COPC) files to load — it will take slight longer.
Like anything else, learn about your data…
The tile I selected did not have a ton of points and image quality improves with more data but you can certainly get the idea…
I also work with point cloud data in Cesium Ion — recently available following the Developer Conference where I recently gave a lightening talk.
Create a free account and upload assets. The copc files weren’t uploading so I reverted to LAZ or LAS.
Did you find this helpful? You are welcome to buy me a coffee — it keeps me awake and writing.
Thank you!
Click image for Venmo.
