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Hi,

This is a question that is really related to another piece of software (lastools) but it is using a product of FME.

Basically in lastools you can colour a point cloud by an aerial image (the same as PointCloudOnRasterComponentSetter). I want to set up a script to do it in lastools because that is faster for this task.

Anyway, lastools only accepts one raster (tif) as an input. I have multiple overlapping rasters. The overlapping parts are identical. What I want to do is merge these rasters and chop to the extents of each input point cloud.

That is all easy but I’m having a little trouble getting it to work. It seems that lastools doesn’t like the RasterMosaicker transformer. The input (pre merged) rasters work fine, and even the clipped rasters (clipped but not merged). Which I’m taking to mean my writer properties are correct. I can’t see any difference in properties between ones that work and a mosaicked raster. I.e the bands/palettes are all the same because the source rasters are all identical in properties

Does anyone know what’s going on? For this task I am using FME 2022

EDIT:
After re reading the documentation I wonder if its actually going to work. I think it may be more if you have a.laz, b.laz, a.tiff, b.tiff etc….

If you read the file you’re writing out of the rastermosaicker back into FME, do you see any issues with it? Especially areas where adjacent rasters overlap?

Do you have Esri/QGIS avaliable to see if their tools provide an output that works? (narrow down the issue)


ORIGINAL:
Rather than passing a single tiff via -image, you should be able to use -imagedir
 


https://downloads.rapidlasso.de/readme/lascolor_README.md

 

I haven’t used -imagedir for coloring, but I have for other tools in the stack


Hi @hkingsbury ,

Thanks for the reply. 


I have tried that (reading the .tif back in) but everything is the same as one of the originals. I.e. same properties and I don’t notice anything funny at the joins


Yes I have tried -imagedir, if you look higher in the lascolor readme it does say it is still limited to one tif per input las/laz. The difference being that you can run in parallel and the filenames need to be the same


I have tried Arc, but I’m not the best at it and I don’t think I did it right. Even if I did get it to work I’m making the script automated and coding Arc to work in command line isn’t something I know how to do. So it’ll take longer to work out than I have
 

 


Does Las Tools throw an error which might be helpful?

Could it be something as silly as mixed up filenames and expectet extent following the Mosaic and clip? For example by default the RasterMosaicker is set up to “Use Attributes From One Feature”. Could a filename be getting in somewhere where it shouldn’t?


Hi @virtualcitymatt , 
lastools gives an error, though it was very basic and didn’t really help me understand the problem. All the filenames do match. I did ask the question to the lastools forum too and it seems they are restricted to TIF files half the size of a bigTIF. I have set up some tiling to clip the raster into chunks that match some tiling from lastools and it appears to work fine.
Here is the forum post if you are inerested
https://groups.google.com/g/lastools/c/A3ovOZaxwiQ


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