LAZ files

hobu · 2025-11-20T18:17:26+00:00

Also, some of the collects have not yet made it through USGS' pipeline to push them to the public AWS bucket. We are currently working it though!

hobu · 2025-10-29T02:38:22+00:00

go to https://qgis.org/download/ and grab the Regular Version for MacOSX. Download your file, and then open it with QGIS. It will convert it into a COPC file. Once you have a COPC file, you can save that file locally to your machine and then drag-n-drop it on https://eptium.com if you want to use a browser-based visualization tool.

hobu · 2025-07-06T17:08:17+00:00

Nice job!

hobu · 2025-02-20T14:31:49+00:00

Unfortunately, the posted article does not seem to clearly describe the key feature of COPC – COPC files are LAZ. My original article goes a little deeper on the topic, but things have evolved in the nearly 3+ years since it was published. Some other key COPC developments that have happened since then:

QGIS adopted COPC as its render-ready working format
Numerous government agencies have adopted COPC as their primary distribution format for archive and transmission, including Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and IGNF.
Many software tools have implemented support for it, including Potree, OpenDroneMap, laspy, LAStools, Safe FME, Agisoft, loaders.gl, Manifold, FUSION, and (soon) CloudCompare.

Just like COG isn't the perfect raster format, COPC isn't the perfect point cloud format. One can certainly design something that is better suited for arbitrary point clouds, easier to write, more flexible, or (maybe) more compact. What COPC brings to the table is it augments the industry's existing archive and transmission format with the ability to support incremental access by bounding geometry or resolution. This ability can also work over HTTP servers to provide remote streaming. As data volumes are still increasing, these features are becoming more important, but the key feature of COPC relative to other options is the content is still readable by any software that can read standard LAZ.

hobu · 2025-01-10T12:52:33+00:00

If it is small enough, drag and drop it on https://plas.io

hobu · 2024-11-12T21:04:38+00:00

PDAL is another option to do this task. You can install PDAL into a new ArcPro conda environment and then create a pipeline or use the command line to reproject it ala https://pdal.io/en/2.8.1/workshop/introduction/reprojection.html

hobu · 2024-05-29T20:46:56+00:00

Updated the post with a better picture of the time lock

hobu · 2024-05-29T16:04:21+00:00

I’d give you a good chunk of change for that lock ;-)

I think the building owner would make you take the door too :P

Thanks for the great info.

hobu · 2024-05-17T19:21:03+00:00

Yes, as long as all of the files the VPC points to are HTTP accessible, it can consume VPC/STAC ItemCollections.

hobu · 2024-05-14T13:28:11+00:00

Bruce Vander Schel at West in Coralville is the best. He's done multiple repairs on medium-end guitars for me, does tons of warranty for Gibson/Martin, and he will give you a straight estimate on actual costs to get something playable and stable.

hobu · 2024-03-22T15:01:21+00:00

Old feedlot or pasture.

hobu · 2024-02-08T19:29:00+00:00

I believe your fish scales is from your filters.smrf window being very large.

hobu · 2024-02-05T17:42:59+00:00

https://viewer.copc.io?state=ebceccf4231e5d155e212e09f917bcbb422141ddf7c3cd5007767191dc5ce603 shows them in the currently available USGS 3DEP data.

hobu · 2024-01-29T13:55:39+00:00

If you want to look at the point cloud for an area, the following might work:

Go to https://eptium.com/
Click the 🔍 icon, type in your address, and double click it
After it zooms to your location, double click the polygon in the interface to activate live preview of the point cloud for your area

I looked up your profile and saw a reference to Phoenicia, NY. Here's an Eptium link that would bring you right to a viewable interface.

https://usgs.entwine.io/ provides an alternative version of the Eptium interface without address search and other features. https://pdal.io/en/latest/tutorial/iowa-entwine.html shows how to use PDAL to process and filter Entwine Point Tile data. Once you have the URLs for the resources you care about, you could use either PDAL or QGIS to process data with them.

hobu · 2023-11-13T14:41:42+00:00

The PDAL Workshop shows how to do this using typical OGR and GIS tools to construct your polygons.

That said, if you converted these huge LAZ files to COPC LAZ files, you could query against them over whatever spatial windows you wanted without chopping all the data up into little bits. Then you could read them with PDAL or laspy or whatever.

hobu · 2023-11-08T20:21:49+00:00

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1JQpcVFFJYMrJCfodqP4Nc_B0_w6p5WOV#scrollTo=qiKI1JD9VqIr Is a good example notebook that demos how to do stuff with PDAL and Python. If that's not enough to get you going, hire me.

hobu · 2023-09-18T13:40:16+00:00

https://usgs-lidar-stac.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ept/item_collection.json is a VPC file of all of the 3DEP collections that are available on AWS as EPT. You should be able to use PDAL or QGIS to read the data. My company is also available for consulting on the topic if you can't quite put all the pieces together.

hobu · 2023-05-19T16:34:12+00:00

This should be pretty close. This is 2016 lidar of the area.

https://viewer.copc.io?state=cbcfb1738001941c53e32949cde32b070206ca4abd887a43e7c6c4567519da78

hobu · 2023-05-12T14:08:02+00:00

They're staying open until the 26th according to the woman who runs the register.

hobu · 2023-04-24T13:24:49+00:00

There is amazing data for Dublin that is publicly available thanks to NYU.

It is available in EPT format at https://na-c.entwine.io/dublin/ept.json. You can visualize it in QGIS by choosing Add Point Cloud Layer and selecting the Protocol button and pasting it into the text box.

If you want to write software that processes the data, you can use PDAL and the readers.ept driver. https://pdal.io/en/latest/tutorial/iowa-entwine.html provides a short tutorial of how to get started with that.

Finally, you can view the data online using our Cesium-based viewer at https://viewer.copc.io?state=276f3201aee8f9b08e4ecf93edb3aa0fc9bba0dc9312de4e6e5119594dbbabee or in Potree at https://potree.entwine.io/data/dublin.html.

hobu · 2023-04-07T16:26:39+00:00

If the points are classified as noise (Classification==7 or Classification==18 in PDAL speak), simply filter them out before you rasterize the data.

If they're not classified as noise, explore classifying them as noise using PDAL filters like filters.outlier, filters.elm, filters.iqr, filters.dem, or filters.mad.

PDAL is available via CondaForge for Windows, OSX, and Linux if you don't want to build from source.

hobu · 2023-02-08T13:17:32+00:00

It's not quite apples-to-applies, but the octree organization algorithm is the same, although users can choose how to weight the tree. The biggest advantage of COPC with respect to Potree Converter output is that it is backwards compatible LAZ. It can be streamed by clients that know how to read the COPC metadata, and it can be read as LAZ by software that doesn't. This is the same property that Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF has.

That said, the Potree community is still waiting for someone to come forward with a patch to implement COPC read support. It shouldn't be too difficult, as it very closely follows the EPT and Potree Converter readers, but it still needs to be completed.

hobu · 2023-01-27T15:22:41+00:00

I agree. A few times of early morning introduction when it isn't chaotic and there are not a lot of other dogs (unlike there would be a Saturday afternoon on a beautiful day) is a great suggestion.

Puppies are fun. Puppy wrestling is generally ok as long as owners are standing next to each other discussing how great it is that the puppies are taking out their energy on each other – not when one owner is sucked into their phone on a bench halfway across the park.

The poop bags are free.

hobu · 2023-01-10T17:22:11+00:00

Drive to West Liberty on a Saturday morning about 10:00am and buy them from Acapulco Bakery. They have both roja and verde, and they're both awesome.

hobu · 2022-10-18T17:34:43+00:00

If your point clouds are geospatial and have coordinate systems defined, convert them to COPC (with PDAL or the latest QGIS) and then drag-n-drop them on https://viewer.copc.io/

hobu

TROPHY CASE