ESRI Grid to USGS DEM – How to Convert ESRI Grid (DEM) Raster to USGS DEM?

arcgis-10.0demsketchupterrain

There is a tool for DEM to Raster in ArcGIS but I need to convert my ArcGIS DEM rasters (mostly LiDAR) into USGS DEM. The idea is to import this DEM into Sketchup and create a "sandbox" TIN surface and for this SketchUp needs the data to be in this particular format.

In the past I mostly used the Sketchup Plugin to export TIN from ArcGIS to Sketchup which worked great but since the plugin no longer works in version 10. I am trying to create a new workflow but I am not having much success. The "Collada method" does not work well for complex surfaces. It requires to first create a multipatch and there is the first issue as described here. Besides, it is painfully slow if the conversion even succeeds at all.

There is another option described here but I have not tried it. Can anyone comment on how well the Cloud v8 plugin mentioned there works?

Best Answer

I think gdal_tranlate is going to be your best bet. I too am having to do this now to get elevation data in Vue for 3D simulations. Right now, I am going from whatever grid format to tif, then using gdal_translate to go to dem. If there is a way to do this natively using ESRI tools, I'd love to know about it. You can use the -projwin flag to clip as you translate:

D:\Projects\VIESORE\GIS_Data\Raster\GTOPO>gdal_translate -of USGSDEM -projwin -1027394.693241 6566367.197442 -426789.325363 6545200.488441 gtopoUTM.tif gtopoUTM
.dem
Input file size is 4216, 6832
Computed -srcwin 1818 4208 737 26 from projected window.

Also, see this question here on GIS.se regarding using GDAL with C# to translate to DEM.

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