[Qgis-user] PDAL to the rescue

[Drew French]

I just wanted to share a quick story with you - I recently switched over to
Linux from Windows and it has been interesting - overall very positive but
a definite learning curve going on here. I was just beginning to work with
LIDAR data and I realized I hadn't set up LASTools and Fusion in QGIS 3.20
and I quickly learned this was not going to be an easy endeavor on a Linux
machine. As I use point clouds fairly often this was alarming. But then I
remembered that 3.20 has LIDAR support built in, and I quickly opened up a
las file and found it to be easy and intuitive to use if you know the QGIS
GUI. Styling and so on is a breeze, and I huge thank you from me to the
developers as I am sure this was a large amount of work to bring to
fruition.

But then I realized that I didn't have any of my old tools to create DEMs
and that was one of the most important things I do on a weekly basis with
point cloud data. I began to look into PDAL and was able to simply create a
quick DEM using PDAL in my terminal following a tutorial online. That was
actually easier and simpler than my other workflow, so now I will be
learning more about PDAL as I go forward.

Just wanted to note that it seems that if you are willing to learn how to
use PDAL, then it seems to me that LASTools and Fusion are kind of obsolete
with this new version of QGIS. Let me know if that seems accurate.

Thanks again to all the developers of QGIS,

Andrew French
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