Aerial LIDAR scans to 3D printing | Hacker News Reader

Aerial LIDAR scans to 3D printing

github.com

61 pointssytelus12 comments

This reminds me of TerraFab (http://terrafab.bengler.no/). A Norwegian site where users can zoom in on norwegian fjords, and press the order 3d print button.

Edit: Someone has put up the Terrainator site (https://terrainator.com/) that generates 3D print files from Google maps. It costs money and you have to 3d print the thing yourself.

Does Slartibartfast know about this!? He was quite proud of those fjords..

There’s a free version (with more options) at http://jthatch.com/Terrain2STL/

Haven’t printed anything yet, but the STL loads great into a slicer (I used cura) of your choice.

fantastic! anyone have sources for USA lidar point clouds?

In related projects, this script takes a GeoTIFF (which usually comes from a lidar pass) Digital Elevation Model, and renders it inside minetest (opensource voxel game). https://github.com/Gael-de-Sailly/geo-mapgen#readme

The National Map! https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic/

Kinda hard to use, though. You can find the raw data by state here: ftp://rockyftp.cr.usgs.gov/vdelivery/Datasets/Staged/NED/LPC/projects/

OpenTopography: https://opentopography.org/data

1.1 trillion points online and growing.

This looks very nice! I've been toying with open LIDAR data from my country (0.5-1 points per m^2) in MeshLab but always got very noisy/spiky meshes.

There are a few solutions much better than the old tech used by meshlab. Specifically, fssr[0], which does a more advanced and especially sample-density-compensating variant of meshlab's poisson reconstruction, as well as instant meshes[1], which does generic retopo, and is able to handle point clouds, while still being _very_ fast and delivers surprisingly good low-poly results (see for yourself).

[0]: https://www.gcc.tu-darmstadt.de/home/proj/fssr/index.en.jsp [1]: https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes

I want a photo of a print :)

what's the cheapest way to get a lidar-scanning drone up and running?

I think LIDAR equipment is still the size of a dishwasher

Not at all, there are many very small and even solid state LIDAR scanners on the market at an accessible cost

edit: Here's a review of 12 https://www.dronezon.com/learn-about-drones-quadcopters/best...

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