FME Blog Keeping Up Appearances

Keeping Up Appearances

Mark Ireland

October 7, 2009•2 min

This post is a quick interlude from schema mapping, and a short item about writing raster features to PDF using surfaces and appearances.

Hi FME’ers,
Here’s a quick interlude from schema mapping.

A workspace currently doing the rounds at Safe is from Core-Team developer Brittany and demonstrates our new Appearance transformers. Appearances are (in basic terms) another form of texture for 3D features.

That workspace takes a DEM dataset, uses the TINGenerator transformer to create a surface, and then applies a raster image using an AppearanceAdder.

Using a worldwide DEM the result is this rather stunning output, which was written out to PDF:

You’ll be able to find the workspace and a description courtesy of Dmitri on fmepedia at http://www.fmepedia.com/index.php/3D_Textured_Examples.

However, what really caught my eye about the workspace was this section in it:

It’s interesting because it shows we can apply a raster feature as an appearance onto a surface, and write that out to PDF (the 3D version). I’m not sure what the technical difference is between this and writing out raster features as-is, but it could be a useful workaround for anyone who wants to write raster features to PDF.

Of course, this being Safe, the developers are writing code faster than I can write blog postings. This morning I found out that:

True raster writing to PDF is now extremely close to being completed. It should certainly be in FME2010. Looks to me like it would be 2D and not 3D though.
The above section of workspace can now be replaced by virtually a single transformer – as the FaceReplacer transformer will shortly accept raster features as input and turn them into a textured face.

Anyway, this was just a little aside to demonstrate some of the new appearance-related transformers that now appear in the latest FME2010 beta. And I’m going to hit the publish button quick before the developers think of any more fancy updates….