Well heck, you guys sure know how to make somebody feel welcome!
So far, my first task is done, which was to survey a hill quite heavily covered in trees. here is an orthophoto (excuse the mess):
My goal here was to get a terrain model sufficient for permitting a home build. I struggled mightily (if not efficiently). In the end, I took the filtered output (cloud file) into cloudcompare for a little manual caressing (and the use of the CSF filter). It also lets me create different ply output files at different resolution (useful for us idiots who didn’t learn about GCPs until after the fact…). So from cloudcompare I get essentially two separate clouds, the ground point in RGB:
and the non-ground points:
Now, in cloudcompare I mesh the various entities (things like the cement pad and the tent/road get separate meshes to maintain resolution. Examples…
I found that with my limited laptop capacity, and the need to use particular graphics cards for the next step of my adventure, it was best to mesh in cloudcompare to reduce the complexity…before moving on to the next package…Meshlab.
So, into Meshlab, go the PLY meshes (so i keep georeferencing), and this allows me to tweak the vertical positions of the “ground” to account for the changes due to smoothing, before flattening into a single mesh of various mesh densities…
and, now…since Sketchup is unable, or unwilling, to consider any outputs from meshlab (dae/PLY) that would be useful. Output to STL it is… and then into Sketchup. And now, all the hassle about the tent and the quonset pad mesh precision is apparent…thanks to the recent update in google earth images, since I now have after the fact GCP (to a degree):
Now, i can use a corners of the tent and the quonset pad as geolocation points for the sketchup model, which has taken the stl, and converted it, finally, into a 3D surface for the site layout and architectural work:
The entire goal of this endeavor was to get a quick survey of the site before clearing, so as to be a bit specific on the tree removal, and also to try to integrate the house into the topography. In July, I was quoted a few thousand dollars and a couple of months. So I started down this journey, Quite a steep learning curve on many levels… And I am sure that there is an easier way to do this, or at least reduce 2 or 3 of the software packages…But try as I might, crash, after crash, after crash (I now own an old r610 server for this specifically) this is what I came up with. And, it was a blast (well, most of the time).
I know this sounds like an infomercial for every open source package out there…
My next goal is the survey of the creek and meadow, since our intent it to install some fake beaver dams and try to flood and resuscitate the riparian zone (and keep the neighbors cows out…). In an attempt to get better resolution in some areas, I am running that at the “ultra” level, and it has been churning in my garage for about 5 days now… I wish there was a countdown clock… I told my wife that me, walking out the garage to pop in a quick DF or TOP to check to see if it was still alive is my form of video slot machines.
Thanks for putting up with the ramble, and I hope this at least provided an amusing chuckle of sympathy (“Poor fool!”). I learned a heck of a lot from reading this forum and the fantastic (POSITIVE) conversation. I don’t think I saw a flame in the entire forum!. For all of you who I have learned from, know that this was instrumental in our moving forward in our restoration effort. And hopefully, if the beaver come back, they will thank you as well.
Anyone out there who has experience in restoration? I would love to find a few folks to bounce ideas off of, before putting together an application. This is all self-funded, so we are looking to do this as low cost/low tech as possible. So trees and dirt for the dams. But identifying the “best” locations for these and other obstructions is also something that has its own steep learning curve…
here is an overall view of creek in its current state, after about 70 years of cattle…at the west end, the cut is 8’ deep…but there is water there at depth in the summer, even during this drought, so I have hope, if we can just slow the water down a bit…
best to all
but that actually depends on what side related to the date line you are… how crazy that is?..