LIS Pro 3D Tutorials

How to find and download point cloud data for our tutorials

In this tutorial, we will show you how you can download freely available point cloud and other data to follow our tutorials.

Data Source

Canton of Zurich

The Canton of Zurich offers point cloud data from several flight campaigns (currently 2014, 2017/18, 2021/22) via its geodata catalog. The data provided by the Amt für Raumentwicklung - Geoinformation of the Canton of Zurich is freely avaible and licensed under the Creative Commons (CC) BY 4.0 Licence. Therefore it is a perfect fit to be used for most of our tutorials.

Our own Terrestrial Laser Scans

The Forestry - TLS tutorial is an exception. For this tutorial we provide a terrestrial point cloud which we acquired ourselves.

Where to download the tutorial data

We have pre-compiled the datasets for each tutorial so you don’t have to spend time searching for them:

You can directly download all the datasets using the links provided above. Below, we explain how to navigate the geodata catalog of the Canton of Zurich to find and download individual LAZ tiles, in case you want to explore data from other areas.

Tile-wise Point Cloud Download

Important

Please note that you can download all the necessary datasets to follow our tutorials using the above provided links. The description below simply describes the download process from the original data provider, the Canton of Zurich.

Since you likely only want to work with a subset of the entire Canton, we describe here how to download individual point cloud tiles. Visit https://geo.zh.ch/:

Now, click on “GIS-Browser starten”. This will open the map view as shown below:

Now, in the search bar, type “lidar”. This should give you the following selection:

To permanently activate the blue tiling grid (important for selecting data for individual tiles), click on the light blue/white cross as shown in the screenshot.

Clicking on a specific tile should open the sidebar on the right:

Here we see two important pieces of information:

  • The tile id (2716500_1241000).
  • The download link. Clicking on Download (LAZ) will automatically start downloading the point cloud data.
  • Note that you can also download digital terrain, surface, and normalized surface models (DTM, DOM, nDOM) in raster format here.