Lidar Point Clouds to Tin

[DanielHayhurst]

Hello,

I'm using High Resolution lidar 8hit/m2 and i get massive amounts of points and i'm having problems generating tins. I managed to create tins by creating an individual shapefiles from each .las file. My problem now is the files are not continuous so when I create the 0.5 meter raster I end up with 9 files which I don�??t want.

Is there a method for creating tins from the mass cloud? I believe its about 12million points for a total of 400mbs,  or merging the tins after I�??ve generated them?

Dan

[JeffreySwain]

I would recommend not using the TINs in favor or terrains.  They are built to utilize all of the las data. Once you obtain the average point spacing from your las files via the point file information tool, then you can proceed with creating a terrain in a feature dataset of a file geodatabase.  Once the terrain is built you can use it in ArcGIS 10 like a TIN, but it is not subject to the node restriction that TINs have.  Here is an blog series on creating the Terrains.