Hey there, I'm currently working on a large route in the Editor, and I’m running into some efficiency challenges with applying LiDAR data across my entire landscape. Here’s what I’ve tried so far: Current Workflow: As shown in the "masterclass". Move camera from A to B, select visible tiles, apply LiDAR and so on. The Challenge: My route is quite large (~ 400 km). The editor only streams very few tiles at a time, meaning that the above process is very, very time-consuming as the LiDAR applying process even for a single tile is very slow (at least what goes for me ). I’d love a way to automate it so I could leave it running overnight. Question: Is there any way to select all existing tiles in the editor (not just the streamed, visible ones) and apply the LiDAR data to them all at once? Alternatively, if there’s a known workaround, scripting option, or method to batch-process these tiles in a more hands-off manner, I’d be very grateful to hear about it. Any advice or tips would be much appreciated!
AFAIK the world composition and Levels browser not allow to apply Lidar. If they would, we could apply Lidar to all or a selection of tiles of the landscape, but not only the streamed ones. A shortcut nonetheless (and I'm not quite sure you already know) is that you don't need to select each of the streamed tiles separately on its own. By pressing Ctrl+A, and if you either have a tile selected in the viewport or a LandscapeStreamingProxy actor selected in the World Outliner, it will select all of the currently spawned tiles so that you can apply Lidar to all of them at once, saving some time. I prefer selecting individual tiles tough, because applying Lidar to a tile which has no or only partwise Lidar coverage may lead to some deformations of the SRTM only landscape. At least in some regions, where I'm sure that the outer tiles have no Lidar coverage. I'm not 100% sure whether the -9999 NoDATA value for the tiles prevents these deformations to happen completely (or only the spikes between tiles, but not the blocks). I'm better one the safe side though. Another thing is that in the Editor preferences, there are a few parameter to adjust the streaming distance for tiles. Lukas showed this at minute 53:40 in the video, but it didn't work back then. However it works for me. You can do that, to have more tiles to apply Lidar onto at once. Type in "Stream" in the search propt and then scroll down, gets you these values. Up the first digit. To my experience, the first times you apply Lidar to tiles takes significantly longer than later in the process. I don't know why actually. Maybe it's because the editor needs some time to load in the Lidar files into the RAM still after the initial loadup process where the editor freezes until ready. So by time, and the more tiles you apply, it will get a bit quicker. At least I experienced this in my Lidar application processes. A tip on the side here, and especially important if working with larger routes and thus a larger amount of Lidar data (40/50/60 GByte), is that you may only load in a portion of the Lidar files and apply them, step by step. This will save some performance and time instead of loading hundreds of Lidar files into the tool. Premise is that you know to which landscape tiles certain Lidar files belong to. If you don't know it, this tip is useless. However, I may recommend splitting the Lidar areas in QGIS and naming the output files differently, so that you know where they belong to (f.e. with a prefix like lidar_south, lidar_north, etc.). Hmmm... Maybe someone like trainsimcz will turn up and provide us a tool/script to automate the process of applying Lidar to all tiles in adjustable amount of distance to a KML line? This would be awesome. Anyway, I'm looking if more people turn up and spoil these tips with a simple quick hack....
I'm curious about the route you're currently working on. When I saw you mention a 400km route, I was very surprised and had high expectations. Can you reveal your current route?
Probably it's stopping to spawn tiles at some value because the parameter aren't meant to let you show the entire map, just increasing the spawning distance a bit I guess. In the end, its also a matter of performance and keeping in mind that the Editor use to crash not so rarely, it might not be good to up the values too high. Maybe its even because of this reason, that there is a certain limit of spawning distance to tiles, which if exceeded would result either in an absolute performance nightmare or a crash. Don't know if anyone has experience working in a way to load larger parts or even the entire map at once in the Editor. It would save the time to unload and load tiles, however because of the reasons above might high likely be too inefficent or even inpracticable to do. So my theory. By the way, 250 spawned tiles is a lot already. Applying Lidar on those probably will take a while.
