The following tutorial cover point cloud transformations and more advanced workflows. For an introduction to the point cloud format, please see the help documentation on this FME Geometry type: Point Clouds (IFMEPointCloud), or read through the Getting Started with Point Clouds tutorial.
Within FME, point cloud geometries are an efficient format because they are treated much like rasters - as a single feature. This makes them useful for intermediate analysis and transformations within workflows, as they are fast and contain attributes that model continuous data, such as elevation.
Two common point cloud transformations that take advantage of these characteristics are:
- point cloud to 3D surface
- raster to point cloud
If you’re new to point clouds, the latter transformation might be surprising, but there many uses for point clouds other than reading and analyzing source point cloud data! Point clouds can be used as an intermediary or output of a 3D model in order to analyze or isolate particular components of the model, as is demonstrated in the Creating Point Clouds from 3D Models or Raster Data tutorial.
In addition, LAS files can be manipulated in FME to create 3D surfaces or building models, and raster colour images or DEMs can be transformed into point clouds for analysis or 3D visualization. We’ll take a look at all of these transformations and introduce a few key point cloud transformers in the tutorials below!
Articles
Point Cloud to 3D Terrain Model with Buildings
This article shows how to create a surface model and extract building heights using point cloud data.
Creating Point Clouds from 3D Models or Raster Data
This article shows how 3D and raster data can be converted to a point cloud with FME using the PointCloudCombiner transformer.
