LasZip

Post any education related material or training courses that are available to assist with getting users trained in laser scanning.
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Dave Davey
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LasZip

Post by Dave Davey »

Why is LasZip so difficult to use for a normal person? Why don't the owners put a nice GUI or installer to the software so it's easy to use?

Does anyone have any step by step guides on how to un-compress a laz file so I can import this into Cyclone? :oops:
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Re: LasZip

Post by LeicaUK_RC »

Hi Dave,

Follow these simple steps...

1. Download this file - http://www.sccshds.co.uk/software/other/laz.zip

2. Unzip to the c drive so it looks like this - c:/laz/laszip

3. Put your LAZ file into the folder above

4. Run CMD and type this command (star been the name of your file) - c:/laz/laszip/*.laz

I hope that helps?

P.S. If you double click the laszip.exe you actually get a GUI to use. ;)
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Re: LasZip

Post by max72 »

You can also use Cludcompare.
From the command line you can convert by drag an dropping:
For instance if you want to convert to LAS simply create a .cmd or a .bat file with the following line:

Code: Select all

for %%f in (%*) DO "C:\<your path here>\Cloudcompare\cloudcompare.exe" -SILENT -O %%f -C_EXPORT_FMT las -SAVE_CLOUDS
Set the right path, save and drag and drop over the batch file

If you prefer E57 in the -C_EXPORT_FORMAT use E57

With Laszip I guess you can use a similar approach, but I'm used to cloudcompare and I have a set of batch files to do this kind of common tasks with a drag and drop.

Another option is Arena 4D. If you use it as a free viewer you can convert the LAZ file to the Arena format, and then export to las, pts, and other ascii formats, all for free.
In the meanwhile you can explore the cloud with Arena..

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Re: LasZip

Post by tbwester »

I agree. laz is hard to use, and I am always worried I have lost some data or translation is wrong.

would rather just zip an e57 file - about the same size too.
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Re: LasZip

Post by dan_mccurdy »

Is there some reason why you can't use PointZip and PointUnZip, located here :

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/pointzip/

Image
Image

It does produce las and laz files that are not in the newest format but I've never had problems with it at all. The GUI freezes when you process files, but it does work and will unfreeze once it's done.
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Re: LasZip

Post by lastools »

Hello from @rapidlasso,
Dave Davey wrote:Why is LASzip so difficult to use for a normal person? Why don't the owners put a nice GUI or installer to the software so it's easy to use?
Good suggestion. You mean a GUI like pointzip.exe and pointunzip.exe? I assume you do not like the "ugly" OpenGL rendered GUI that each of the LAStools comes with?

Another suggestion would be to get the folks from Cyclone to support LAZ directly. Do they have LAS support? I would be happy to assist them adding native read and write capabilities for LASzip compressed point clouds to the importer and exporter of Cyclone. Do you know whom to contact? Lots of software already has native LAZ support (see http://laszip.org). If you have to decompress the data first before you can load it into your software it kind of defeats the purpose of a compressed format.
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