I am updating our maps for an orienteering club in Illinois. I was very excited to find out that we have access to .las lidar data in 2000x2000ft files. I checked out OCAD11 and it can handle .las files so I thought I was golden. Except the .las files are in feet and OCAD11 does not handle feet and the conversion to utm is not right. I have contacted OCAD and they are unable to solve this issue. So I am looking for a possible work around or alternate workflow for develop georeference contours in utm.
I have looked at Fusion and also the article "Using Lidar point clouds for Orienteering base map generation" by Terje Mathisen. I do not see a clean path for dealing with multiple .las files covering a park and also dealing with the Illinois state plane to utm.
My current plan is to create a dem in OCAD11 export to a dem file. Import the file to QGIS, do the conversation to utm, export to xyz file, import back to OCAD, create contours.
Can someone suggest a cleaner simple workflow? I would like to avoid buying OCAD11. We currently use OCAD9. I would like to be able to make the contours externally and import them into OCAD9.