The nice thing about working with DEMs is that the resultant Civil 3D surface will typically produce beautifully smooth contours, which are preferred for many applications (such a presentation material). DEMs are often a raster data type stored in geoTIFF format (which Civil 3D can easily work with). Method 2 involves simplifying the point cloud by converting it into a model with a desired resolution, e.g.
If you don’t have Recap, or if your Civil 3D is crashing because of massive point clouds, or if you want to save time then method 2 is for you.
Method 2: LAZ to DEM (geoTIFF) to Civil 3D
