Normally consultants (LiDAR survey) provide me with data to my specifications; already in ESRI GRID or ASCII GRID format. This way LiDAR data can be easily used with ArcGIS. This time I only have xyz files (i.e., with regular spaced xy coordinates).
Previously, I would use a utility by Min-Lang Huang named GridBatch that would convert XYZ to ASCII GRID then to ESRI GRID files. Unfortunately, the utility is crashing since I upgraded my machine to W7 64bit and ArcGIS to version 10.
Is there another way to batch convert LiDAR surface XYZ data to ESRI GRID files?
(Convert to points -> Interpolate is an option I would like to avoid considering there are 300+ tiles to convert).
Best Answer
Sounds like you're wanting to do this in batch (don't blame you)
As STH said, looks like Global Mapper will indeed do batch conversions. Nice price as well.
FME Desktop can do using the RasterDEMGenerator transformer and a bit of linking with reader/writer, but you'll need the Pro version, not available in the ArcGIS Data Interop extension.
If free is more in your budget, gdal_grid should do it. You'll have to spend some time figuring out the extents of all your xyz files, but ogrinfo will make short work of that, and then writing a batch file/script to run it over each file.
Or you can use ArcGIS ASCII 3D to Feature Class (requires 3D Analyst) chained with Point to Raster, as described here and then batchify the process with ArcPy or ModelBuilder. If you don't have 3D Analyst, you can use any number of arcscripts or LASTools txt2Las and las2shp to get it in a format ArcGIS can work with. I know you didn't want to convert the txtfiles to intermediate feature classes but this isn't too labor intensive, and you already have access to the software.