[Liblas-devel] LAS SHP Viewer

[Hamish]

Michael wrote:
> Does anybody know a decent combined LAS and SHP viewer?
> All the stuff I've found is too clunky to just view both types of files
> easily (like instantiating it from a command line 'view data.las
> data.shp').
> 
> I have tried Mars Explorer and PointVue.
> 
> I'm about ready to write my own.  If anybody has source for a decent
> LAS Viewer I can add SHP files to it.

besides the ones already mentioned (SAGA, GRASS GIS's NVIZ [1], etc), you
might do well to have a look at Paraview [2] which is a pretty popular one.

I'm not sure if it will deal directly with liblas, but it's easy enough to
export to x,y,z,,,, text format using `las2txt` which Paraview or similar
should definitely be able to read. Shapefiles are standard enough that
almost all softwares can already read them.

"VisIt" [3] is another VTK based visualization program along the same
lines as Paraview that you might check out.

(For what it's worth, GRASS's NVIZ was originally developed by the US Army
research labs; Paraview by Sandia+Las Alamos Natn'l Labs; and VisIt by
Lawrence Livermore Natn'l Lab, so very much your tax dollars in action..)

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR
[2] http://www.paraview.org
[3] https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/


I am not familiar with Fusion/LDV or 3D viz in R stats, but for a 3D points
shapefile it's easy enough to output to 3D ascii csv text file for use
with most programs, using ogr2ogr from GDAL or similar programs.


regards,
Hamish