Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Taming Terrain: Sculpting Geoscapes With LiDAR
Search
Andrew Godwin
August 31, 2018
0
320
Taming Terrain: Sculpting Geoscapes With LiDAR
A presentation I gave at Electromagnetic Field 2018
Andrew Godwin
August 31, 2018
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Andrew Godwin
See All by Andrew Godwin
Reconciling Everything
andrewgodwin
1
370
Django Through The Years
andrewgodwin
0
290
Writing Maintainable Software At Scale
andrewgodwin
0
500
A Newcomer's Guide To Airflow's Architecture
andrewgodwin
0
400
Async, Python, and the Future
andrewgodwin
2
720
How To Break Django: With Async
andrewgodwin
1
780
Taking Django's ORM Async
andrewgodwin
0
770
The Long Road To Asynchrony
andrewgodwin
0
750
The Scientist & The Engineer
andrewgodwin
1
810
Featured
See All Featured
Have SEOs Ruined the Internet? - User Awareness of SEO in 2025
akashhashmi
0
280
Ecommerce SEO: The Keys for Success Now & Beyond - #SERPConf2024
aleyda
1
1.8k
Paper Plane (Part 1)
katiecoart
PRO
0
5.2k
Applied NLP in the Age of Generative AI
inesmontani
PRO
4
2.1k
Building Flexible Design Systems
yeseniaperezcruz
330
40k
Jamie Indigo - Trashchat’s Guide to Black Boxes: Technical SEO Tactics for LLMs
techseoconnect
PRO
0
81
We Have a Design System, Now What?
morganepeng
55
8k
A brief & incomplete history of UX Design for the World Wide Web: 1989–2019
jct
1
320
Embracing the Ebb and Flow
colly
88
5k
The innovator’s Mindset - Leading Through an Era of Exponential Change - McGill University 2025
jdejongh
PRO
1
120
Max Prin - Stacking Signals: How International SEO Comes Together (And Falls Apart)
techseoconnect
PRO
0
110
[SF Ruby Conf 2025] Rails X
palkan
2
820
Transcript
Taming Terrain Sculpting geoscapes from LIDAR Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Hi, I’m Andrew Godwin • Python
programmer-at-large • Geodata enthusiast • Does not (yet) own LiDAR equipment
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 1. Data 2. Modelling 3. Fabrication
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 1. Elevation Data
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Can be either surface or terrain
(no buildings/plants) Digital Elevation Model
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Source: maps-for-free.com
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Hawai'i (ASTER GDEM)
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Radar
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Low resolution Needs large-ish antennas Long
distance
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin LiDAR
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Light Detection And Ranging
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Very high resolution (cm range) Compact
devices (planes or vehicles) Short distances
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Free data in both point clouds
and DEMs! e.g. Environment Agency, USGIS
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin data.gov.uk earthexplorer.usgs.gov
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 2. Processing
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin "Point Cloud"
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Multiple returns Too much detail Noisy
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin a. "Thin" point cloud b. Rasterise
point cloud to DEM c. Smooth results
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 3. Fabrication
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 3D Printing Laser Cutting Milling
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 3D Printing
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 4 - 12 unattended hours (per
15cm tile) Difficult to line up perfectly Has to print perfectly square!
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Milling
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 2 - 4 attended hours per
10cm piece Small features hard to mill CNC mills ain't cheap
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Laser Cutting
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin 15 minutes to cut, 15 mins
to glue Only works for features surrounded by flat Limited detail
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin What's next?
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin Less human-intensive milling Better laser cut
feature highlighting 3D directly from point clouds Somehow getting a LiDAR scanner?!
Andrew Godwin / @andrewgodwin code: github.com/andrewgodwin/lidartile blog: aeracode.org videos: youtube.com/user/andrewgodwin
Thanks. Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin aeracode.org