Schwarzwald is a command line tool to generate acceleration structures for point cloud data, supporting the 3D Tiles format and Potree format. Schwarzwald will convert your raw point cloud data into data that can be visualized with CesiumJS and Potree. Schwarzwald is very fast, supporting machines with dozens of logical cores.
Supported input formats
- LAS/LAZ
Supported output formats
- LAS/LAZ
- 3D Tiles
- Binary dump
Windows build is not tested!
Requirements:
- CMake >= 3.22
- gcc >= 11.4 or another C++17-compliant compiler
- (Optional) Docker >= 18
Schwarzwald uses LASzip from the lastools. Before building Schwarzwald, build LASzip like this:
cd ~/dev/lastools
git clone https://github.com/m-schuetz/LAStools.git
cd LAStools/LASzip
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. && make
This should produce liblaszip.so in ~/dev/lastools/LASzip/build/src.
cd ~/dev/path-to-this-repository
mkdir -p build/release
cd build/release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLASZIP_INCLUDE_DIRS=~/dev/lastools/LASzip/dll -DLASZIP_LIBRARY=~/dev/lastools/LASzip/build/src/liblaszip.so ../../
make
This should produce the Schwarzwald executable in ~/dev/path-to-this-repository/build/Release.
Run sudo docker build -t schwarzwald:latest . from the root folder.
Schwarzwald supports two different modes:
tilerfor creating an optimized point cloud structure- (Currently unsupported, might be removed in future versions)
converterto convert the result of thetilermode into different output formats
To get information about the possible arguments, call Schwarzwald without any arguments.
The easiest way to generate 3D Tiles is to call Schwarzwald like this:
Schwarzwald --tiler -i /path/to/your/LAS/files -o /output/path/for/3D/tiles --output-format 3DTILES
This starts a tiling process that generates 3D Tiles and stores them in the specified output folder.
Potree-compatible tiles can be generated like this:
Schwarzwald --tiler -i /path/to/your/LAS/files -o /output/path/for/3D/tiles --output-format ENTWINE_LAZ
As the name suggests, this generates data in the same format as the Entwine tool, which is fully compatible with Potree.
There are several parameters that control the structure of the tiles. They are very similar to the ones that PotreeConverter supports:
-s [ --spacing ] arg (=0) Distance between points at root level.
Distance halves each level.
-d [ --spacing-by-diagonal-fraction ] arg (=0)
Maximum number of points on the
diagonal in the first level (sets
spacing). spacing = diagonal / value
--sampling arg (=MIN_DISTANCE) Sampling strategy to use. Possible
values are RANDOM_GRID, GRID_CENTER,
MIN_DISTANCE, JITTERED. The quality of
the resulting point cloud can be
adjusted with this parameter, with
RANDOM_GRID corresponding to the lowest
quality and MIN_DISTANCE to the highest
quality. JITTERED gives similar quality
to MIN_DISTANCE, but with better
performance.
--tiling-strategy arg (=FAST) The tiling strategy to use. Valid
options are FAST or ACCURATE, where
FAST will yield better performance but
larger data.
There should be little reason to manually set the tiling-strategy parameter unless you have strict space and quality requirements. The FAST strategy, which is the default, has much better performance but will produce slightly larger data.
Depending on your environment, you might want to ignore some errors that can occur during processing, such as unreadable files or unsupported file formats. To do some, use can use the following option:
--ignore arg (=NONE) If provided, all recoverable errors for
the given categories are ignored and
processing proceeds normally instead of
terminating the program. Specify one or
more of the following possible values:
MISSING_FILES (= ignore missing files)
INACCESSIBLE_FILES (= ignore
inaccessible files)
UNSUPPORTED_FILE_FORMAT (= ignore files
with unsupported file formats)
CORRUPTED_FILES (= ignore
corrupted/broken files)
MISSING_POINT_ATTRIBUTES (= ignore
files that don't have the point
attributes specified by the -a option.
Default values will be used for these
attributes)
ALL_FILE_ERRORS (= ignore all
recoverable file-related errors)
ALL_ERRORS (= ignore all recoverable
errors)
NONE (= terminate program on every
error)
Schwarzwald supports all regular point attributes defined by the LAS standard (v1.2). For the output formats ENTWINE_LAS and ENTWINE_LAZ, all attributes are retained in the output LAS/LAZ files. For the 3D_TILES output format, this is not possible as 3D_TILES does not natively support all the different attribute types that LAS does. Currently, Schwarzwald only stores the positions, RGB colors and intensities with 3D_TILES.
It is possible to calculate RGB colors from other attributes when writing 3D_TILES using the following option:
--calculate-rgb-from arg Calculate RGB values from one of the
other point attributes. Accepted values
are: INTENSITY_LINEAR (convert
intensity values to RGB using a linear
mapping), INTENSITY_LOG (convert
intensity values to RGB using a
logarithmic mapping), NONE (do not
calculate RGB values, same as not
specifying this option). This feature
is only supported when output-format is
3DTILES
By default, Schwarzwald writes point positions in the same coordinate system as they were in the input files. If you want to convert the positions into EPSG:4978 (the world coordinate system of 3D Tiles and Cesium), you have to specify the spatial reference system of your input files in proj format like so:
Schwarzwald --tiler -i /path/to/your/LAS/files -o /output/path/for/3D/tiles --output-format 3DTILES --source-projection "+proj=utm +zone=32 +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs"
This example uses the proj string for the UTM32N spatial reference system.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Loosely based on the source code of PotreeConverter v1.7 by Markus Schütz, licensed under BSD 2-Clause. Source code available at https://github.com/potree/PotreeConverter