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.
See the user guide for usage examples and instructions.
Binary installer packages for windows are provided on the releases page. For linux, it should be fairly easy to build it yourself by following the instructions below.
Install dependencies using your package manager. Here's a handy list of dependencies for several distributions:
# 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 # Older ubuntu (qt4 based - add cmake flag -DDISPLAZ_USE_QT4=TRUE) sudo apt-get install git g++ cmake libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev python-docutils # Fedora 23 sudo yum install git gcc-c++ make patch cmake qt5-qtbase-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:
The windows releases are built using cmake and Visual Studio. 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 14 Win64" -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 14 Win64" ^ -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.
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.
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.
To read the .las and .laz file formats, you'll need one of the following:
If you only want to read ply files (for example, to use the scripting language bindings), and don't care about las you may set the build option DISPLAZ_USE_LAS=FALSE.
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
Behind the scenes displaz uses code written by many people. The following third party projects are gratefully acknowledged: