TOOL LIDAR data - available for free for England

[LilSKi]

the coverage stops 500 metres before the track I want to create. Doh !

Yeah I wanted to do Willow Springs or Thunderhill maybe and same thing. Maybe by the time I finish Watkins Glen they will be scanned.

 

[Pixelchaser]

yeah thunderhill, then Utah, ....

thunderhill ive been wanting to do ever since before the extension. all the data sucks. I have several laps of track gps data for Utah, so maybe still possible. but must try lidar properly soon. maybe barber.... have buddies that stay there too.

edit, yep I'm plumping for barber.

 

[LilSKi]

yeah thunderhill, then Utah, ....

thunderhill ive been wanting to do ever since before the extension. all the data sucks. I have several laps of track gps data for Utah, so maybe still possible. but must try lidar properly soon. maybe barber.... have buddies that stay there too.

Barber is being built by Rigel off the lidar data and is pretty far along at this point. Limerock has data as well as Road Atlanta with nobody working on them as far as I know. Summit Point is also a great track and also has data.

 

[Pixelchaser]

hmm, so you are doing Watkins glen. limerock was in iracing wasn't it ? might go looksee. never been a fan of the american tracks really but ac needs more for sure. and ill go wherever the lidar is

 

[LilSKi]

hmm, so you are doing Watkins glen. limerock was in iracing wasn't it ? might go looksee. never been a fan of the american tracks really but ac needs more for sure. and ill go wherever the lidar is

Limerock would be a good first Lidar project. It is pretty short and has pretty dense woods all around it so overall a fairly simple project. Similar to my NJMP project. It is also a pretty iconic US track so lots of videos and info on it.

 

[Pixelchaser]

I shall go grab limerock and surrounding hills then. cheers.

edit: actually I can see it available, but that it utterly awkward I cant differentiate which laz file the data is in and I'm not downloading 37 gig.

will try cart option on noaa.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Thanks for that!

Upon doing some searching based on your reports I found some data for a few projects I may be working on.

I used different sites, I'll post links later.

One was data for a NY area, and the data is pretty good, aerial based, solid colour.
One was for Montreal, easier to figure out what to d/l etc, also nice data, but processed so some bridges and over passes are missing.

Either way it's great for free data!

Oh for the data to have colours based on photos though!

This is where photogrammetry is still the best!

Maybe into summer I'll invest in a drone then I can just do my own hq point clouds

 

[Pixelchaser]

managed to grab Lime rock I think. I'm surprised how small this track is in size .I hope that's why the las file I ordered is only 14 meg . i think somthings wrong . but maybe not as it is 1km x 600 m approx. thats gota be maximum a million polys i reckon.. not big at all. will rtb the outer scenery.

so pissed thunderhill aint scanned to be honest. me and Fernando been looking at that for nearly 2 years. btb/zaxon method build and rtb build. .. just the damn road would be a fictional effort in rtb.

 

[Pixelchaser]

pretty sweet this data is. more than worthy in just 1 tile.

next task is "help" . I cant for the life of me remember how I ever got clouds to max before.

 

[LilSKi]

pretty sweet this data is. more than worthy in just 1 tile.

next task is "help" . I cant for the life of me remember how I ever got clouds to max before.

I made the mesh in cloud compare and exported to stl format which I was able to put into blender.

Also make sure you utilize the intensity data to build the actual layout on and not google earth.

Oh and NJMP would have fit on one tile if it was positioned just right. I'm kind of jealous that Limerock fit.

 

[Pixelchaser]

yeah most stuff me and liquid wanted to do was always split too. I have zero knowledge with dealing with this intensity stuff, liquido is good at it. sadly he has some life changing issues at present and cant be around. are there any tutorials regards this ? or even just some ui pointers.

hmm STL files, that rings a bell.

 

[LilSKi]

yeah most stuff me and liquid wanted to do was always split too. I have zero knowledge with dealing with this intensity stuff, liquido is good at it. sadly he has some life changing issues at present and cant be around. are there any tutorials regards this ? or even just some ui pointers.

hmm STL files, that rings a bell.

I never made a full tutorial but this and my post below it shows what it looks like in cloud compare
http://assettocorsamods.net/threads/nisseringen-denmark-lidar-landscape.420/page-3#post-3888

 

[Pixelchaser]

yeywoo ! 0.5m subdivided terrain and map from the cloud.\o/ not even an hour to do. its too easy.

do you subdivide lilski?, any hints and tips with this in general I certainly have a fragmented mesh with no smoothing. or do you just literally build over it ?

 

[LilSKi]

I left it as is but I'm sure there is 100 different ways to do it. I simply built a spline road over the terrain as shown in that post. I felt the data was a tad too noisy and I didn't want to do any smoothing that could potentially change the data.

In blender I lined the splined road to the intensity data and then shrunk to data. This got it close and then I just fine tuned it by hand.

If you do something different I would like to know what you did. I am still very new to the lidar thing myself.

 

[Pixelchaser]

all ive done is select subdivide on te cloud, its ment to equally space it out. then generate mesh fbx. its a rough rough surface I have. I feel it needs averaged out somehow.

 

[Mr Whippy]

The data from aerial lidar is noisy.

The noise floor on a USGS sample I got looks about 30cm deep.

What's important is averaging it using statistical approaches.

Problem is meshing the data might not give that ability, depending on the algorithm.

The mesher for instance has no idea if the lidar is noise free and scanning a rough road... or if the lidar is noisy and scanning a smooth road.

You need to defund that.

As I said earlier (iirc a year ago haha) the key is in turning the lidar to a vert position that represents what you want.

I'd probably filter the clouds pre mesher. There is likely more statistical processing control there, than in the meshers.


Thankfully clouds2max has a nice conformer right onto clouds, so you conform a quad visual mesh right onto your points with a filter size and multi-sampling approach.

It's a shame someone hasn't made a clouds2max type thing for Blender yet as it's the only essential tool missing for track makers now (meshing clouds isn't ideal though I'll agree it's workable)


Hmmmm

 

[Pixelchaser]

what about Pro Optimiser modifier ? just posted over on my lime rock thread regards that tool and its effect on my noisy data, it certainly seems to average everything out.

I am just going with the raw data subdivided on CC, bad idea?

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm not sure what the best approach may be.

Probably isolating the road explicitly in cloud compare (or as close as possible) and then point cloud smoothing, before meshing.

Once you've meshed you've gone too far I'd say.

 

[Pixelchaser]

managed some cloud smoothing on a version today, very nice. also done more dabbling with this pro optimiser. and matching each version, and I cant find any significant loss of accuracy anywhere, amazing to be honest.

 

[Pixelchaser]

hehehe, this was about 12 .las tiles 41 million polys covering 5x5 km around lime rock. now its 200 k and no loss of form. utterly perfect for out terrain and inner terrain. I'm quite amazed to be honest. and half of it can get cut away no problem, and ten times better than anything from rtb that's for sure.