Importing LiDAR data into a Terrain using ArcGIS 10

quick intro into how the ArcGIS can be used to convert lidar data into a terrain for use inside arcmap one things that isn't mentioned in the video but it's very important is you need to make sure that you have licensing for 3d analyst and that the 3d analyst extension is turned on otherwise a lot of the things I won't show up in the menus and won't work if they did with that though on our catalyzation of how to import lidar data into arcgis basically of what we have here is a is arc catalog not arcmap arc catalog and so what we want to do is to create go to the place in our file system so we're going on to the folder connections we're going to go to the place we'd like to put it I set up a folder called test lidar I want to open that one and then I want to do a new file geodatabase okay and it's uh it's going and creating my file geodatabase they're taking its own sweet time as it typically does I'm going to rename that does is called test ok the next step that I need to do is within that file geodatabase i need to create what's called a feature class so i'm going to click on that file geodatabase and i want to do it or choose me a new feature dataset okay it then comes up and asked me what name would I like to have and I'll just call it test one and then I'll go to the next bar there that's bottom of your screen ok so I'll click Next and then it asks me what coordinate system I'd like in this particular case I know that my lidar data is in state plane and so I'll use that and it's in Harn u.s. feet and then we've got to go down and find Virginia Sal for this particular data and then it asked me for a vertical coordinate system I want the North American and I'd like an abd 88 that's what that data uses and then it asked me some additional questions about tolerance and things like that I'm going to accept the defaults on that and hit finish okay so now within our file geodatabase or we've now have a feature data set called test now we'd like to actually add some data into that to that for that we're going to scroll down to our tool box and under 3d analyst tools there's conversion and under conversion there's from file and under that there's last two multipoint so we're going to select that one click on it again wait interminably while it comes up okay there's our last multi-port point tool there now you can choose by the way a directory here so you can choose a folder in which case it will pull in all of the last files from inside that folder and that's a huge time-saver because if you're doing individual files and you have a lot of them by finding is been if you select more than about 50 files the loader malfunctions and it starts putting weird characters and nothing works in this case here that we're just going to do a couple of them so we're going to do files I'll hit the open button to browse and I have this one under or let's see we need to go where the data is which is some on my computer it's on the the II drive again the long way yes so we'll go to the and then we'll go into I'm going to use some of the 1 meter lidar data because that's the stuff in state plane light or going to the LAF data I'll select us 3 of the tiles hit OK and then it's going to populate this list here with those ones that we had listed we then need to tell it what the output feature class is ok so we need to go to our feature data set and and then add a new name for the for the feature class that we're creating and I'm going to call it the multi pointer or my multi-point so for that I go to my folder connections see it's in my work folder there and then we'll go down to somehow got into site met director there let's see then we call this one test lidar and there's my test you database and there's the test and now I can give the name so my whole T okay we don't have to say what the average spacing is in this case here it's about in this case it would be about every three feet it's a roughly one meter spacing in this then we can if we wanted to use class codes we could put those we can also then select which returns we'd like to have in this case here we'll just sort of request any return so we're going to be getting back all of them and then we can also include some in truth input attribute name just for fun all I'll pull up the list there but by clicking here again taking its own sweet time and I'll just have it through the intensity and the return number okay and then the input coordinate system which is optional and I'm going to select that and protected state plane so hard us feet for somebody we're sorting in reverse order so Virginia speed knew the top Virginia South and it okay to throw that coordinate system and then the file suffix is a last and hour we don't want any sort of a z factor we don't want to blow it up if we wanted to change it in the meter if we could set that 2.30 to 8 whatever we would like there but I'm just going to leave it in feet there and so I can hit okay so I think it's thinking about it there now what's going to happen is it should pop up a little button a thing on the bottom that says that it's doing that importing so it's we can also go up here to geoprocessing and look at the results window look at the current session the last multi-point and see what it's doing there was not seeing any messages yeah so this has got the the imperfect information on it there it seems to be running for a slow there but we'll give it a second I usually as this is doing it it will actually give you a readout of maybe how much it's gone along the way I don't know why the output feature class is still empty at this point I would have thought that it would be processing a little faster there so you close the results window and I will just going to pause this until it's finished doing the import okay our last multi-point tool has indicated that it completed properly by a little message box that popped up at the bottom of screen so we can now go in to our test data set and we can see that we've got my multi-point now what we can also do is now go to tests and right click on that and then we can tell it to do a new terrain okay this is where we're going to create take and combine the data from the multi-point to actually create such a sort of a tin like surface for it and that in this case here the points are about three feet apart and I'm going to call it test one terrain that's fine get next and then let's see so I can click on this if I want to change some things about it but but that's fine this is a shape thing and those are basically mass point so I don't need to do anything else on that I'll let it use sort of the default way of doing the pyramids I'll tell it to calculate the pyramid properties okay so now we've got all of our our settings together with the pyramids and then we can hit finish and now it says they new create terrain has been created would you like to build it now and will say yes and it now goes off and starts starts building the building pyramid or building the pyramids and building the terrain again this process takes takes a little while so I'll I'll pause things there before we take a look at it okay it's completed now and what we now see is that we now have our test terrain data set as well as our multi-point data set stored inside our geo database or within our feature data set stored inside our geo database let's take a look at the test terrain there and see so here's the information about it and now we can click preview and we'll see what it looks like okay yeah it doesn't in in arc catalog it doesn't what I guess it does do something okay so there's a preview of our terrain there obviously it hasn't been sort of color-coded well and things like that so it's bit ugly but anyway we've now got our lidar data into the into the system now let's open up the terrain we've created I've opened up arcmap hit the add data and i've this is not already navigated to our test gdb we're going there and we'll pull up our test terrain so there is now our terrain and it's got the elevation measurements on it I'm not exactly some of this may have been marsh and things like that let's do our zoom in yeah we can see that the details there it looks like to you like this must be fisherman's Island I think I recognize that curve on the on the Chesapeake Bay bridge-tunnel there and we can actually get down to the point where we're seeing the individual polygons would be individual ten elements associated with the things let's see what the identify tool has to tell us about anything okay so yeah if you do identify it will give you a readout on on you know what your location is what the elevation is what the slope is and what the aspect is which is a handy thing to be able to do so we've now got our data we're ready to to start doing some analysis with it now we can also convert this obviously into a de M or something like that but that's a whole different process so I'm not going to talk about that now thank you enjoy

Channel: J_Porter_Vid

Views: 45,226

Rating: 4.9398499 out of 5

Keywords: GIS

Id: Ze4j5WV4ZZU

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2012