As far as setting up Geoserver goes, this is what seems to work for me:
First, grab your lidar data and combine it into a single file. (Tiling is another topic, but looking briefly into it, I notice a related app called GeoWebCache specifically designed for tiling datafiles. It is also available as a standalone app and might be useable for our needs by itself. I’ll get around to checking it out)
Install a Java Runtime Environment (version 8), then install Geoserver and try starting it up. As I said before, the default port setting didn’t work for me; I changed it and it works okay. Once it’s running you can access the Admin page (
http://localhost:yourportnumber/geoserver), log in and set up access to the data.
First you need to create a workspace.
Click on Workspaces, and select Add new workspace
Give it a name
Set the URI to
http://localhost:yourportnumber/workspacename and click Save
Then you need to create a datastore under the workspace that references your datafile.
Click on Stores, and select Add new store
Select the filetype of the lidar data you’ve got
Select the workspace you’ve just set up, and browse to the datafile
Save it and you’ll be directed to the New Layer chooser
Select Publish and set up some layer parameters
You need to insert a URL for the data (
http://localhost:yourportnumber/workspacename). The same works for both Metadata and Data links
Not sure if it’s necessary to change the Declared SRS…
The bounding boxes should be okay as they are
(The only other thing I set was in the WMS settings. I set the interpolation method to bicubic. This calculates an elevation value based on the 16 surrounding boxes to get the best possible output, but there is a performance penalty. The default setting just gives the nearest value, which could lead to visible stepping. Bilinear is the compromise option. This needs testing to see if there’s a visible effect, and if the performance penalty Is noticeable. Now I think about it, this option may only be relevant to raster rendering, and not to plain text output, not sure about this)
Select Layer Preview and find the entry for your data. Click on the OpenLayer link and this will bring up a new tab showing a clickable display of the data. Clicking on it should show altitude values. The URL for this page is the one you need to copy into config.php (only up to ‘wms?’). Copy in the layer name as well.
Save the changes to config.php, start up Apache, and run RTB…
Once you start subdividing your terrain, open the log file in xampp/htdocs/maps/logs and check that you’re getting WMS elevation values rather than Google. If the Google values are shown rather than the WMS, copy the WMS URL into your browser and see if you get an error instead of ‘GRAY INDEX = elevationvalue’. If so, either I’ve not explained things correctly, or you’ve missed a bit somewhere…
Good luck!
Any problems, please ask. Occasionally I find a setup that was working yesterday refuses to cooperate. So far I haven’t found a way to fix this. In the end it’s easier to set up a new workspace etc. etc. as before