Description
 

This scenario was requested by some of the customers, but didn't make into our list of scenarios for FME 2011. However, when I looked at it a bit closer, I realized that we have everything in place what is needed for making profiles and slices across the road every N meters.


Moreover, this scenario is probably much closer to real life than most of the previous scenarios, which are usually free from any extra, non-point cloud steps. Simply have a look at the workspace overview with all the custom transformers and compare it with the workspaces from other scenarios:



The scenario deals with a mock road upgrade project. The source data consists of a shapefile representing road network and several LAS files:



The output should be delivered in MicroStation DGN and POD (MicroStation V8i directly supports POD files, that is, they can be attached to a design file - very much like raster files) or LAS (used in this example).


The workspace extracts the road that is planned for an upgrade and buffers it. The buffer is used for selecting overlapping point cloud tiles and clipping them. Along the road, 200 meters long cross section lines are generated every 500 meters.



Cross sections are also buffered. For profiles, we need a really thin buffer - 1 meter is enough for our example. For slices, we can take a bigger number - let's make it 50 meters. The buffers serve as clippers, and the point cloud along the road is used as a clippee. The features leaving Clipper(Article#: 000001409) are the point clouds representing slices - we only have to save them to LAS (slices are shown with bright color):



As an extra process, we can make profiles along cross-sections, which would give use the following result (this is not the part of the workspace):


See attached template workspace LIDAR_Slices.fmwt

Note that the attached workspace is slightly simplified from the original shown on the screenshots above and reduced in volume for faster downloading