We at rapidlasso had finally the chance to meet Victor Olaya of Boundless who created the Processing framework (formerly know as Sextante) that is now integral part of QGIS. On the last day of the joint workshop organized by Dr. Lene Fischer at the Forest and Landscape department of the University of Copenhagen that saw 2 days of LiDAR processing with LAStools followed by 2 days of GIS exercises with QGIS and Processing, we decided to do an impromptu, unscripted, and unplanned experiment in front of the course participants, doing something none of us had tested before:
We wanted to see if we would be able to use the existing LAStools and QGIS Processing functionalities to create a LiDAR Processing Model that would take a single LAZ or LAS file as input, find the bare-earth points with lasground, compute the height of each point above the ground with lasheight, look in the remaining points for buildings and vegetation with lasclassify, generate a set of polygons around the building points with lasboundary, and open the resulting shapefile in QGIS.
After some discussion a Processing Model was decided upon. Holding our breath we started it. SUCCESS! On the first try! It was a nice way to conclude our 4 days of LAStools and QGIS training as you see below … (-:
See this blog entry (also see the blog’s comment section) for information on how to add LAStools to your QGIS Processing toolboxes.
