Description

A transformer to combine two or more geometries into a single point cloud.

Transformer Highlights

Combining Point Clouds

PointCloudCombiner can be used for making point cloud mosaics.



For example, we can take multiple point clouds covering a certain area, say, a county, and bring them together into a single point cloud, which can serve as a source for surface modelling of smaller scales or as a general overview:


Source Tiles    


Point Cloud Mosaic



Note that the resulting point cloud can reach really gargantuan proportions. To bring the point cloud to a reasonable size, use PointCloudThinner.

Combining Other Geometries

An interesting feature of PointCloudCombiner is its ability to take many kinds of geometries and turn them into a point cloud. It can be a raster, a polygon, even a surface.


If we send a raster to PointCloud Combiner, we can get either a flat color point cloud from an RGB image, or an elevated point cloud from a numeric raster. After some manipulations, we even can get an elevated color point cloud (see "Further Reading" section).


The illustration below shows a DEM in CDED format raster converted into a point cloud. Data Inspector colors the point cloud by elevation:


Source DEM
(top view)   


Point Cloud
(perspective view)



The following example shows how a SketchUp model looks like after PointCloudCombiner. Note that for vector features we have to specify Point Interval parameter, which defines how dense is the output point cloud:


Source SketchUp model   


Point Cloud

Further Reading

Mosaicking point clouds together as well as making point clouds from other geometries were requested by our users.


See our Scenario 4: Thinning and Combining Point Clouds for an example of combining mitliple point cloud tiles into a county-wide coverage.


Scenario 15: Creating Point Clouds shows how to make point clouds from raster features and 3D models.