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c42f / displaz

A hackable lidar viewer
http://c42f.github.io/displaz
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geospatial lidar point-cloud

readme

============================================== displaz - A viewer for geospatial point clouds

displaz is a cross platform viewer for displaying lidar point clouds and derived artifacts such as fitted meshes. The interface was originally developed for viewing large airborne laser scans, but also works quite well for point clouds acquired using terrestrial lidar and other sources such as bathymetric sonar.

The goal is to provide a flexible and programmable technical tool for exploring large lidar point data sets and derived geometry.

User guide

See the user guide <doc/userguide.rst>_ for usage examples and instructions.

Installation

Binary installer packages for windows are provided on the releases page <https://github.com/c42f/displaz/releases>_. For linux, it should be fairly easy to build it yourself by following the instructions below.

Building

Linux

Install dependencies using your package manager.  Here's a handy list of
dependencies for several distributions::

    # Ubuntu >= 22.04 (and probably other debian-based distributions)
    sudo apt install git g++ cmake qtbase5-dev python3

    # Ubuntu >= 14.04 (and probably other debian-based distributions)
    sudo apt-get install git g++ cmake qt5-default python-docutils

    # Mint
    sudo apt-get install git g++ cmake qt5-default libqt5opengl5-dev python-docutils

    # Fedora 28
    sudo yum install git gcc-c++ make patch cmake qt5-qtbase-devel mesa-libGLU-devel python-docutils

    # OpenSuse
    sudo zypper install git gcc-c++ libqt5-qtbase-devel glu-devel python-docutils

The following commands may be used to build displaz on linux::

    # Get the source code
    git clone https://github.com/c42f/displaz.git
    cd displaz

    # Build LASlib and ilmbase
    mkdir build_external
    cd build_external
    cmake ../thirdparty/external
    make -j4
    cd ..

    # Build displaz
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..
    make -j4

    # Install into CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
    sudo make install

Troubleshooting:

* Some people have had issues with a version of qt in their path clashing with
  the qt headers installed on the system. This may give an error such as
  "undefined reference to qt_version_tag", or some other qt library-related
  link error.  For example having the qt version distributed with the python
  package system ``conda`` has been known to cause issues, which can be solved
  by removing it from the ``$PATH`` variable *before* calling cmake in the
  script above.

Windows x64

The windows releases are built using cmake and Visual Studio <https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx>_. To install the dependencies on windows, manually download and install the following tools:

To build, first clone the repository using the msysgit command line::

# Get the source code
git clone https://github.com/c42f/displaz.git

You can build displaz with various supported cmake build system generators. For the continuous integration build (and probably future releases), the Visual Studio generator "Visual Studio 14 Win64" is used::

rem Build LASlib and ilmbase
mkdir build_external
cd build_external
cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..\thirdparty\external
cmake --build . --config Release
cd ..

rem Build displaz.
rem Assumes that Qt has been installed into C:\Qt\Qt5.5.1\5.5\msvc2015_64
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" ^
    -D CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\Qt5.5.1\5.5\msvc2015_64 ^
    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=dist ^
    ..
cmake --build . --config Release

rem Optionally, create the installer package
cmake --build . --config Release --target package

Some of the cmake generators such as NMake Makefiles" won't find visual studio unless it's in the path. In that case you'd need to launch the steps above from the x64 cross tools command prompt.

OSX


TODO - for the moment see the generic build instructions below.  Also note that
displaz is regularly built on OSX via travis-CI, so the commands in the file
``.travis.yml`` in the repository should more or less work.

Generic build

To build displaz, install the following tools:

Displaz also depends on several libraries. For simplicity, the smaller dependencies are bundled in the thirdparty directory. There's also an automated download/build system for some of the larger ones (LASlib and ilmbase) available at thirdparty/external/CMakeLists.txt. However, you will need to install the following manually:

Both the LASlib and IlmBase libraries may be built using the separate third party build system in thirdparty/external/CMakeLists.txt.

Docker


Dockerfiles based on a variety of Linux flavours are provided, see
`the docker README <docker/README.md>`_ for instructions on building docker images.

Supported Systems
-----------------

displaz is regularly compiled on linux, OSX and windows.  It's known to work
well with recent NVidia and ATI graphics cards and drivers.  Some issues have
been observed with Intel integrated graphics and older ATI drivers.  If you
observe rendering artifacts there's a reasonable chance that your graphics card
or drivers are playing dirty tricks

Third party libraries used in displaz
-------------------------------------

Behind the scenes displaz uses code written by many people.  The following
third party projects are gratefully acknowledged:

* Qt - http://qt-project.org
* LASLib - https://github.com/LAStools/LAStools
* Imath - https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/Imath
* rply - http://www.impa.br/~diego/software/rply
* GLEW - http://glew.sourceforge.net/
* Small pieces from OpenImageIO - http://openimageio.org