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Hello,

 

 

I having issues creating a 3D pdf from a coloured LAS file.  I can make the points display in the pdf but it is not displaying the colour of the points.  What am I missing?

 

 

Thanks

 

 

Sarah Wach

 

Manitoba Hydro
See if the PDFStyler Transformer helps you, you can use it to apply global colours or pick up values from an attribute that contains the colour.
Ok, I tried running it again with the output directed to the Inspection Application.  I can see the colours in there.  I also tried the pdf styler and I still get black points in Adobe Reader.
I just did a quick test as I remember an oddity with this. Assuming you are using the 3D PDF writer not the Geospatial PDF writer, try inverting the colours. So set your fill colour to the colour you want, rather than the pen colour which is normally the case for a point, works for me. Though I'm not sure why this is the case as its the reverse for every other format. Maybe Safe will comment...
It doesn't seem to matter what I do with the pdf styler the points stay black
The only thing I can offer further I'm afraid is that the 3D PDF Writer details in the Readers and Writers Reference Manual says that there is no support for "Generic Color Support", whereas the reverse is true for conventional PDFs. That says to me that you perhaps need to do further processing to generate a surface from your point cloud before you can colour it or add a drape layer to it. I have done this sucessfully to PDF and there's certainly plenty of examples on FMEPedia, like this:

 

 

http://cdn.safe.com/fmepedia/attachments/000001523/WorldDEM.pdf

 

 

though none that I can see showing colouring points in a PDF output, like some of the images shown here:

 

 

http://fmepedia.safe.com/articles/Samples_and_Demos/Creating-Point-Clouds-from-3D-models-or-rasters

 

 

I suggest you log a ticket direct with Safe and post your findings back here for other users to see.
Hello,

 

 

Maybe away to overcome this could be to rasterize the points, since rasters do display correctly in 3D pdf (ImageRasterizer?), and displaying it on a matching background color.
This is my topic on Google Groups related to the issue. Perhaps it helps? I would strongly advice on limiting the numer of points as much as possible. PDF does not handle points or 3D very well! 

 

 

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/fmetalk/SjcQwEQuPak/discussion

 

Thanks for the input everyone.  The product I need to create is lidar points coloured from imagery shown in 3D so rasterizing or creating a surface won't work.  I am going to put in a support ticket to find out why the points display properly in Inspector but not Adobe Reader.
Ok, I have an answer about displaying the point cloud points in a 3DPDF.  I needed to add an ElevationExtractor, Bufferer and 3D Forcer between the PointCloudCoercer and PDFStyler.  
Sarah

 

 

I'm having the same problem as you did with point clouds in 3D PDF. The point clouds won't display unless I coherse them to points. Then I lose the colour.

 

 

How did you use the ElevationExtractor, Bufferer and 3DForcer to assign the colour from the imagery?

 

 

Martin

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