Description

Decomposes all point clouds into points or multipoints (aggregates of points). This transformer is used when writing to formats that do not support point clouds.

Transformer Highlights

OutputGeometry

"Output Geometry" parameter offers four modes: Boxed Multipoint, Sequential Mulipoint, Single Multipoint, and Point.

The first two modes can make several chunks of points. Sequential mode splits the incoming point clouds in the sequential order, that is, making a chunk as soon as the number of points reached some specified amount. In the point cloud, points are not necessarily ordered in a reasonable spatial manner, so the chunks in sequential mode can look quite random and vary significantly from point cloud to point cloud.

Boxed mode "chips" the point cloud taking into account spatial distribution of the points. This mode allows having near rectangular chunks of more or less comparable proportions.

The illustration below shows a point cloud (left) passed through PointCloudCoercer with Sequential (right above) and Boxed (right below) modes. Mutlipoint coloring is set with RandomColorSetter:

The drawback of "Boxed Multipoint" option is its worse performance - Sequential mode can be about 30% faster.

Further Reading

Coercing Point Clouds to points was among the things our user wanted to see in FME 2011. See our Scenario 14 for the examples, showing how to make points or multipoint features from point clouds.