Step 1 – converting a buildings' vector layer to raster

We are going to deal with a highly urbanized landscape, whose primary features have been greatly transformed by humans. In the context of visibility analysis, this means that lines of sight are blocked mainly by buildings, while the original relief features play only a minor role. In our dataset, we have two layers that describe the area of interest, exterior, and appearance:

• lidar_dem: This represents the bare earth only, and provides a description of the general relief

• building_footprints: These are polygons that depict all buildings, and they also contain information about a building's height in feet above the bare earth's surface in the height_roo attribute field

We need to add their values in order to obtain a meaningful result, but these layers use different data models: DEM is a raster coverage, and building footprints is a vector polygon layer. That is why before adding them, we should first take layers to a single common data...