The ability to colorize a point cloud, and assign colors to elevations, provides an easy means to create a flood inundation model.
With the constant release cycle of their Feature Manipulation Engine (FME), Safe Software continues to improve performance and address additional data formats with their data transformation toolset. The 2013 release marks their 24th, with a 3% speedup achieved through a meticulous sleuthing of bottle necks as the the low-hanging fruit of major performance breakthroughs are behind them.
One of the areas of concentration has been on LiDAR point clouds, where there are new tools to write custom filters and calculations on individual points. With the Expression evaluator each point can be color coded based on elevation height. For instance, tinges of blue can be added to items below a certain threshhold for a quick flood inundation model. Additionally, users can burn in contours, by replacing colors of points at specific elevation intervals with darker colors. Other users have made use of this capability in a process to take the cloud and clip it by water bodies, at the elevation of a lake, doing away with some of the issues faced with false returns around water.
Another advancement is the support of the E57 Lidar point cloud format that was created by a committee of users outside of vendor influence. This format is being used more widely, and the supplied reference library that has been made available greatly simplifies the integration with software.
Safe has been working on various aspects of 3D data processing since 2008, and they have seen an uptick of use over that span as they’ve added more support and as 3D modeling has become more important. According to Dale Lutz, co-founder and CTO, German customers are doing more around 3D with planning as there is money to be made to understand and simulate what’s coming. They also deploy more models online for citizen feedback.
A new capability of the GeometryValidator allows you to validate items that say they are 3D, confirming whether they are completely closed, and to detect any holes. You can fix coordinates, and solve issues where the model is mixed up about what is inside or outside. CityGML files have downstream issues in this area, and repairing automatically ensures model integrity.
A surprising development has been the interest to take a perfectly good 3D model and to create a point cloud out of that and put it in with a broader point cloud of the area. There are advantages for high-performance navigation of this model in this format as in essence it creates a sketching step to understand the broader context and surroundings before modeling with textures takes place.
One new and interesting aspect of the latest release is the ability to read and write Zip files, regardless of the formatted data they hold (whether it is a DMG, Shape or other format). This fits neatly into workflows where data from different systems needs to be accessed and incorporated, but perhaps never opened in its native software. Some customers use the functionality in workflows where they then never have to make a directory, they just write outputs to Zip and then can integrate that output into the process. Zip thus becomes a ubiquitous container for multiple-file formats. It supports a flow of data outputs that can be temporarily be packaged, where the Web is an extension of the file system for on-the-fly reports and dashboards.
Read more about the lates FME release here.
