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FME

Safe Software's FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) is a purpose built ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool for spatial data. FME has designed to read, write, and manipulate spatial data in a large range of formats. It features a node-based interface for linking together flows of data from different inputs to different outputs, and enables data to manipulated with over 500 different built-in data transformers. This makes FME very powerful for data integration and automation of data processing. It also has a built in viewer which is useful because it means even quite unusual datasets and formats can be inspected. FME offers a Free Trial but also provides Free Licenses for Students, Instructors, Non-profits and Home Use if you meet Safe Software's qualification criteria.

Personal Experience

FME is a technical tool aimed at speicialists and has a steep learning curve. Each transformer is built for a specific purpose and has a large range of paramenters. This means that keeping the online documentation to hand and checking the FME Knowledge Base and FME Community Forums is essential. At the same time the tool has enabled me to take 2D data in classic formats like shapefiles and combine them with largescale Lidar datasets to create urban-scale 3D models. I've used these to create massive tiled city models in Unity or Unreal, and its even allowed me to convert that data back into point clouds for other creative applications. I've also found FME a life saver by allowing me to quickly replicate or upload information to databases like Postgres or MongoDB. Its kind of a swiss army knife for spatial data. Highly recommended if you can persevere.

Tools & Software Integrations

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Resources

3D

Point Clouds

  • Colour and Point Clouds - Demonstration of how to apply RGB colours to a point cloud from a raster dataset like aerial photography. It also shows how those colours can be manipulated using point cloud components and attribute data.

Notes and Troubleshooting

Relative File Paths for Portability

File paths for FME readers and writers can be paramaterized with nested parameters to make workspaces more portable - Create a new user parameter. - Name the parameter e.g. Parameter1. - Provide the root path e.g. C:\Project\Projectname\. - Create a second user parameter combining the first parameter with the rest of the file path e.g. $(PARAMETER1)\Data\file.shp . - If the workspace is moved the reader and writer file paths can then be updated for the whole workspace by amending the vlue of the first paramenter.

Source: Understanding relative paths

Load 3D Geometry into PostGIS Database

This can be achieved using the GeometryExtractor to change the geometry encoding. - Use the GeometryExtractor: - Set the Geometry Encoding parameter to OGC Well Known Text. - Check the value of the Destination Geometry Attribute (e.g. _geometry). - Use the GeometryReplacer: - Set the Geometry Encoding parameter match that of the GeometryExtractor (e.g. OGC Well Known Text). - Set the Geometry Source parameter to match the Destination Geometry Attribute specified by the GeometryExtractor (e.g. _geometry). - Connect the POSTGIS writer.

Source: Create geometry from WKT in FME