Tutorial: Use PDAL wrench to automate workflows

3. Create a VPC layer from tiles

Now we're ready to create a Virtual Point Cloud layer (VPC) from the tiles. Remember that the advantage of VPC's is that we don't replicate the big datasets, but we can use VPCs as intermediate layers in our processing workflow.

To create a VPC we use the build_vpc command.

1. At the terminal type the following command and press <Enter>:

pdal_wrench build_vpc --output=merged.vpc 65DN1_07.LAZ 65DN1_08.LAZ 65DN1_12.LAZ 65DN1_13.LAZ

We used --output to define the output vpc file and then we type the LAZ file names that we want to merge, separated by a space. You can also provide a text file with the file names.

Now we have the VPC layer, we can proceed with clipping it with a polygon layer in the next chapter.