How to output PointCloudOnRasterComponentSetter results to 3d pdf?

If I remember correctly (this is acouple of years ago) @dmitribagh had a very nice trick on how to make pointclouds perform well in pdf, hopefully he can share this again.

Hi @robertdbuckley,

I am afraid, I don't have a good answer about point clouds in PDF 3D.

If we write the points directly (point clouds should be coerced to points), we are limited to just a few thousand points for a comfortable viewing. I think, 50,000 points was already a bit too much.

A more effective way to show points in PDF 3D is to use the "Shaded Vertices" Render mode for a surface with a texture, but this is not a point cloud visualization at all - we would generate a surface from a point cloud, use the raster as a texture and the surface feature will go to PDF. There is probably no point of showing such surface as a point cloud.

If you are not limited to PDF 3D, there are other options. Lastools has laspublish tool, which allows showing big point clouds through a browser (we have some lastools transformers in FME Hub but lastools themselves are a separate product).

ThreeJS library has some point cloud capabilities, here is an example where I made a point cloud from 500,000 points and stream them back to a browser from S3:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/safe-scenarios/ThreeJSExamples/PointCloud/surface.htm

Setting this up is not a very simple or straightforward process, but I have a working prototype. I don't publish it widely because it is really raw, but can share my workspaces doing this kind of output.

Dmitri