Bruce asked me about this process in a e-mail so I wrote up an overview and thought it was worth posting that here so everyone know what the status of this is. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a complicated process at the moment but hopefully I get time to write out detailed instructions sometime over the winter.
First you have to get enough detail into the plot to begin with because I can only replace the elevations of existing points with my scripts, not add new points. I’ve come up with a process for adding detail to a plot. I use 60 yard tall shapes that run the width of the plot and do a smooth but cancel it. This adds points at spacing of approximately 3 yards. I repeat this over the entire plot. Over areas where the actual holes will be I use a 20 yard tall shape at whatever width necessary to cover the hole. This results in 1 yard spacing of points in these areas. Before you do any of this you have to plan ahead and drop enough shapes to prevent any one shape (or the main plot) from exceeding 175,000 points, or else the architect will crash. Eventually you’ll optimize this down but when you first import the LiDAR you have to have a lot of points in there to capture the detail of the LiDAR. Probably the easiest way for everyone to deal with this is for me to just make a pre-made plot with a lot of detail so people don’t have to go through this setup process.
Next, I wrote some python scripts to process the files. It will require people to install python. Basically you drag your prepared architect file onto a python script file and it spits out a CSV file with all of the points currently contained in that architect file. You then replace all of the elevation values in the CSV file with values from the LiDAR (more on that in the next paragraph). Finally you drag the CSV file onto another python script file. This time it reads the CSV, updates all of the elevation values of the points in the architect file, and creates a new architect file with the updated elevations.
The biggest obstacle to everyone being able to do it right now is updating the elevations in the CSV file to match the LiDAR. I use Global Mapper, a $600 program, to do this and could give steps for people to do it in there relatively easily. Most people can't afford that though. There likely exists the possibility of using a free program, such as QGIS, instead, but I or someone else would have to figure out how to do it in that, or another program.
Until I have time to write detailed instructions and figure out a way to do the LiDAR CSV elevation updates in a free or cheap program, I’ve offered to do plots for people as I have time, which I’ll say would typically be within two weeks of a request. Also part of this offer is I won’t do another plot for you until you’ve finished and released a course based on the last plot I did for you.
