I'm a career woodworker/computer nerd and I've been fascinated by ways of capturing natural geographic features in wood. Its funny, at one point I thought I was at an intermediate level of knowledge about point clouds. These past 2 weeks have made me realize I know nothing.

Anyways, I'm lost and I was hoping for someone to point me in the right direction, specific instruction, or a good youtube/book/academic something. I added a little imgur for reference if what I say is confusing/wrong to those in the know, especially since what I think is a height map probably isn't.

https://imgur.com/a/SbJv3jD

Short story long: I recently did a super low poly 3d carving of my home state[1,2], and realized that didn't cut it and I needed much more detail.

Random Google searches later I find myself with a few gigs of .laz data of Long's Peak[3] from USGS[4] that I spent 2 days trying convert to .las with python so I could create a mesh to import into blender/fusion 360. Couldn't get that to work.

Then I found cloud compare, and realized it looks like it has 20-30 years of functionality built into the UI and I think it can do some of what I want, which is to generate a heightmap based on what is seen in the screen[5].

It will take me a while to learn, and I feel like filling in the voids from the overhanging sections of the cliff face is challenging. But, I think generating meshes from point clouds has the level of detail I want. One of my carving tools is .25mm at the point.

Then I found out about DEM(probably not the real DEM) and QGIS and figured that might be a slightly quicker route for return on results for my basic wants.

After downloading EDNA_DEM, I try and load every file and I get the same result[6], not sure this is a problem. This seems to be what I'm after, and now that I have it I don't know what to do lol. Is there a way to add territory/political lines to help orient myself, and highlight specific features? Or a way add a layer of roadways to the elevation map? I'm working my way through the wiki and other sources, but I seem to pick the most complicated route first. So I thought I'd ask here before trying to add manmade info to the equation.

Thanks for making it this far and for the help!