Generating point files with attributes

MatthewMcDonald1 — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:59:02 GMT

Point file process

G-day ESRI forum, once again I find myself stuck on something I???m sure is mind-numbingly simple but none the less beyond my comprehension.

I???m attempting to generate a point file from a Las. file, with an attribute table including each recorded point along with its northing, easting, elevation, intensity, and return number. I know there are intensity values and return number values in the data however I can???t get them into the attribute table to experiment with. Any clarification anyone could provide as to how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

My best thought is to produce a very fine raster wherein each cell is likely to have either no values or only the one value for each variable (intensity, return number, elevation) and convert to a point file. I have no idea whether this is the appropriate way to achieve this or not, but if it is I imagine the process will vaguely resemble the following;

1. Point file information: using a subject las file and extracting point spacing
2. Las to multipoint: convert subject las file into multipoint format (using the point spacing found in step 1)
3. Multipart to singlepart: to get data in the required point format
4. Add XY data: to add XY data
5. point to raster
Using a very fine cell size to ensure cells either have 1 value for each variable or no value
6. Extract values to points

Other processes I???ve looked at include the ???Create las dataset??? or ???Las dataset to raster??? functions.

It is worth mentioning also I have been unable to try any of this process as any attempt to produce a multipoint with intensity as an attribute is met with an error message telling me ???las attributes are not permitted in shapefiles???.

Cheers in advance for any insight anyone can provide...

Re: Generating point files with attributes

JeffreyEvans — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 02:45:44 GMT

I am not sure if ESRI has added functionality to their LAS utilities in 10.1 but this is not straightforward in <=10.0. I would suggest using LASTools. There is even an Arctoolbox available as a front end to the commandline tools. You want the las2shp tool.

Re: Generating point files with attributes

MatthewMcDonald1 — Wed, 01 May 2013 06:41:37 GMT

G-Day Jeff, my apologies for the lateness of my response...

Can you give me some idea as to how i would use las2shape to do this? I'm not overly skilled with ArcGIS and I'm not sure how to use this feature in this context... i can open the tool in arcmap, but thats about where i hit a brick wall and i can't seem to find any explanations online that i can make heads or tails of...

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Generating point files with attributes

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Re: Generating point files with attributes