LAS and LAZ are both very common and powerful formats to save pointcloud data. Nevertheless, some users, or programs, may require another point data format. A common general format to save geometric data, for said requirement, is the wavefront OBJ format.
Using one of the sample LAZ files of LAStools we will show you how to convert a LAZ file to the OBJ format in several ways.
We will use the file „lake.laz“ out of the ./data sample directory of LAStools as an example.
Using a simple single line command will raster and triangulate the points to an OBJ file.
las2tin -i lake.laz -o lake.obj
It is possible that there will be cases in which you do not want to triangulate the points.
As the OBJ file is a very basic ASCII/text format we can convert point data simply by using the OpenSource LAS to Text converter „las2txt“.
las2txt -i lake.laz -o lake.txt -extra v -parse Exyz
Using this command it should be easy to convert the LAS/LAZ files into a pointcloud OBJ file as a single operation, as well as within a workflow or batch process operation.
Because the OBJ file is a basic ASCII/text format the file size of the result will be circa factor 10 of the original size.