Question

Dissolve/Smooth touching data in 3D

  • 12 January 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 4 views

Hello everyone,

I am new to FME, I just turned to it in search for a GIS problem I couldn't solve in ArcGIS and I am surprised by the wide choice of tools! But I still haven't found the solution I was looking for.

I am looking for a way to dissolve or even better smooth touching 3D data. My input data is ESRI shapefile (either multipatch or polygonZ). Any workaround would help, and avoiding to obtain a single feature in the output but maintain the attributes of segments (except at crossings) would be a great plus.

Briefly, what I have is a street network as 3D polyline shapefile, with a field indicating the width of every street. In ArcGIS I used 3D symbology to create a strip of the right width, and "3D layer to feature class" to obtain a multipatch. However, this operation naturally cause overlaps at road crossings, which are a) not nice, and b) causing many issues when I process my data further (e.g. flickering "Z-fighting" polygons).

One idea was to use the Soliddissolver transformer, but it does not seem to work with my data. I also have bridges, hence I really need something that works in 3D for close features. The desired output would looks as in Multipatch_width.jpg (where we also see the base data, and we do not see the overlaps, but they are there unfortunately).

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance,

Best regards

Natan


4 replies

Badge +22

Have you looked at the AreaOnAreaOverlayer with the various Connect Z Modes?

Badge +16

Have you tried buffering the lines with the width attribute and dissolving the resulting polygons?

Userlevel 2
Badge +17

Hi Natan,

I'm sorry, but I don't think we can create a complete solution for you with FME's tools. Currently, FME cannot easily clean up the slivers where the segment buffers join, or retain the line elevations to buffer the over/underpaths correctly.

We have some planned enhancements for the Bufferer that would help you in the future (non-overlapping buffers, Z retention), and if you would like to provide us with your contact information (through support@safe.com), we would be happy to notify you when those become available.

Hi Natan,

I'm sorry, but I don't think we can create a complete solution for you with FME's tools. Currently, FME cannot easily clean up the slivers where the segment buffers join, or retain the line elevations to buffer the over/underpaths correctly.

We have some planned enhancements for the Bufferer that would help you in the future (non-overlapping buffers, Z retention), and if you would like to provide us with your contact information (through support@safe.com), we would be happy to notify you when those become available.

Hello Dave,

 

 

Thank you very much for your answer. I will send my contact to your support e-mail as you suggested.

 

 

I would like to thank also jdh and itay for taking their time to respond, although their suggested unfortunately did not work.

 

 

Best wishes

 

 

Natan

 

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