Command line usage

info

The info sub-command outputs informations from a 3DTiles file in the .pnts or .b3dm format.

Here is an example on how to retrieve basic information about a tile binary content, in this case pointCloudRGB.pnts:

$ py3dtiles info tests/pointCloudRGB.pnts
Tile Header
-----------
Magic Value:  pnts
Version:  1
Tile byte length:  15176
Feature table json byte length:  148
Feature table bin byte length:  15000

Feature Table Header
--------------------
{'POSITION': {'byteOffset': 0}, 'RGB': {'byteOffset': 12000}, 'POINTS_LENGTH': 1000, 'RTC_CENTER': [1215012.8828876738, -4736313.051199594, 4081605.22126042]}

First point
-----------
{'Z': -0.17107764, 'Red': 44, 'X': 2.19396, 'Y': 4.4896851, 'Green': 243, 'Blue': 209}

convert

The convert sub-command can be used to convert one or several .las file to a 3dtiles tileset.

It also support crs reprojection of the points (see py3dtiles convert –help for all the options).

py3dtiles convert mypointcloud.las --out /tmp/destination

merge

The merge feature is a special use case: it generates a meta-tileset from a group of existing tilesets.

It’s useful to be able only a part of a pointcloud. For instance: if one has 6 input las file (A.las, B.las, …, F.las), there are 2 solutions to vizualize them all in a 3dtiles viewer:

• run py3dtiles convert A.las B.las … F.las and diplay the resulting tileset

• or run py3dtiles convert A.las, then py3dtiles convert B.las, … and then run py3dtiles merge

The advantage of the 2nd option, is that it allows to update a part of the pointcloud easily. e.g: if a new B.las is available, with option 1 the full tileset has to be rebuild from scratch, while with option 2, only the B.las part has to be rebuilt + the merge command.

export

Two export modes are available, the database export or the directory export. They both transform all the geometries provided in .b3dm files, along with a tileset.json file which organizes them.

The directory export will use all the .wkb files in the provided directory. Warning: the coordinates are read as floats, not doubles. Make sure to offset the coordinates beforehand to reduce their size. Afterwards, you can indicate in the command line the offset that needs to be applied to the tileset so it is correctly placed. Usage example:

$ export_tileset -d my_directory -o 10000 10000 0

The database export requires a connexion info string, the name of the table and its column that contains the geometry and (optionally) the name of the column that contains the object’s ID. Usage example:

$ py3dtiles export -D "dbame=mydb user=me host=localhost port=5432" -t table -c geometry_column -i id