[GH85Carrera]

Back to Hump day.

The Portland weather has arrived. Just drizzle and cold.

My business partner is processing on one project. The DSM (Digital Surface Model) is just a LAS format file so most any mapping program and AutoCad like programs can open it. It is 25 gig. That is a whole bunch of points or pointcloud. Each point has a RGB value, (Red Green Blue) and an XYZ geospacial point (Cartesian coordinate system) and if you view it at normal magnifications it looks like a photo. Since it has full XYZ values you can spin it around and look at it from any angle.

We also produce DTM (Digital Terrain Models) that removes all structures and vegetation. So it is a map of what would be left behind if you had a giant vacuum cleaner and sucked up every building, tree, bush, utility pole or anything that is above the surface. All that is left is the shape of the drainage and hills so the low spots and high spots of the bare earth.

Pretty cool stuff. We used to do it the hard way, by manual photogrammetric methods. Now the computers do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Of course, we do all of that for surveyors. They take the data, check it against their data, and they put their engineering and survey stamps on it. We just save them tons of boots on the ground work.